Unusual Winter in South Africa

Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon like a magician extended his golden want o'er the landscape; tinkling vapours arose; and sky and water and forest seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This was done from my imagination, no preliminary sketching - 
W&N watercolours on Arches 300gsm - 10" x 7" - unframed

A couple of years ago, in August 2006, South Africa was struck by an unusual phenomena, snow! It is something we rarely experience and it therefore always creates great excitement as well as hard-ship. Especially in the farming community, as livestock is always at risk because of the vast sizes of our farms and the large numbers of livestock we farm with - no barns really big enough to house all of them. No protection against the freezing temperatures and also a great problem with feed supplies. Luckily, people like us on smallholdings (8.5ha, which is 10 morgen or 21 acres), have fewer animals, making winter much more manageable, but still not worry-free.

ITEM ID : UnusualWinter
PRICE - R350.00 including postage IN SOUTH AFRICA

Why the environment has to be preserved

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

- Bill Bradley

Done from my imagination, no preliminary sketching - W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8" - unframed

We're still having a lot of rain here in Tarlton, Gauteng, South Africa, and my palette is definitely being affected by this - I'm drawn to all the wet and cool colours as we haven't being seeing much of the sun at all. Our dams are filled to capacity, rivers are swollen and causing flooding and, of course, the gardens are smiling!

I'm not sure whether us humans are all to blame for 'global warming' and the strange weather patterns, because Mother Earth has her own natural cycles of warming and freezing, but the mess that us humans make on this planet is of major concern to me. Isn't a beautiful landscape enough incentive for each and every one of us to take responsibility for our mess in order to preserve it....?

ITEM ID : EnvironmentPreserved
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

A Farmhouse somewhere in the Karoo

I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.

- Ella Maillart

W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm - 12" x 8"

'n Plaashuisie êrens in die Karoo.

The Karoo (a Khoisan word of uncertain etymology) is a semi-desert region of South Africa. It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south.
The Great Karoo has an area of more than 400,000 square kilometers. From a geological point of view it has been a vast inland basin for most of the past 250 million years. At one stage the area was glaciated and the evidence for this is found in the widely-distributed Dwyka tillite. Later, at various times, there were great inland deltas, seas, lakes or swamps. Enormous deposits of coal formed and these are one of the pillars of the economy of South Africa today. Volcanic activity took place on a titanic scale. Despite this baptism of fire, ancient reptiles and amphibians prospered in the wet forests and their remains have made the Karoo famous amongst palaeontologists.

Western people first settled in the Cape in 1652, but made almost no inroads into the Karoo prior to about 1800. Before that time, large herds of antelope, zebra and other large game roamed the grassy flats of the region. The Khoi and Bushmen, last of the southern African Stone Age peoples, wandered far and wide. There were no Europeans and no Africans of Bantu extraction.
Info from "Wikipedia":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo>

ITEM ID : FarmhouseKaroo
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

Come walk with me

W&N watercolours on Bockingford 300gsm - 8" x 12" - unframed

"Are you feeling, feeling, feeling like I'm feeling
Like I'm floating, floating, up above that big blue ocean
Sand beneath our feet, big blue sky above our heads,
No need to keep stressing from our everyday life on our minds
We have got to leave all that behind.
- The Avett brothers

ITEM ID : ComeWalkWithMe
PRICE - R350.00 including postage in South Africa

Winter setting in

“People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.”
- Anton Chekhov

"Winter Setting In" - watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - Maree©
Size - 11" x 8" unframed

Although the lawn in my garden is still thick and green from all the rain we've had, the veld and roadside is starting to show the effects of Winter - all the Cosmos is gone and the tall thatching grass is yellow and dry, just waiting for the first careless cigarette to be flicked out of a car window - this Black Wattle tree still hasn't recovered from the ravages of last year's fires and got a second dose when the property owner did his fire-break this week. Pity, but fire-breaks are a necessary evil if we are going to be protecting our properties from these, sometimes dangerous, fires.

ITEM ID : WinterSettingIn
PRICE - R850.00 including postage in South Africa