Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Vergelegen

 Wednesday 13th April.  I make a point of always going to Vergelegen when I first arrive in the Cape.  I go because it is such a beautiful and peaceful place, and, most importantly, I go to honor my parents who loved it here.  Vergelegen (which means ‘’situated far away”) is a magnificent old estate which was originally granted to the Governor of the Cape, Adriaan Van Der Stel, in 1700 and is now owned by the Anglo American group. It is exquisitely maintained, produces excellent wines and covers over 7,000 acres.



The main building at Vergelegen through the camphor trees


In the Walled Garden

Our plan was to stay for a couple of hours, but Nancy is a keen photographer, and we end up spending much of the day here and settle in for a late lunch on a shaded patio overlooking the rose garden  -- cous-cous salad with roasted butternut, some of the Estate’s wonderful wine, lemon cheesecake and berries.

Nancy is in photographic heaven, capturing the charm of the old Cape Dutch buildings, the stunning octagonal walled flower garden, the enormous 300 year old camphor trees, the spread of the lawns, the lily ponds, the babbling stream, the herb gardens, the roses ……  


Three hundred year old Camphor trees

Graceful Cape Dutch architecture and me

Clouds pouring over the Hottentots Hollands Mountains

The Herb Garden

Among the Just Joey Roses
I smell the Just Joey roses which were my mother’s favorite and imagine I can see my father sitting under one of the giant trees, his body stiff with Parkinsons, while he looks up high into the branches, his spirit lifting in awe and respect.  My parents will always be in that garden for me – cradled and nurtured by its settled beauty, its enduring history.

Then we go to Morgenster, the adjoining olive and wine farm, to buy a bottle of lemon enhanced olive oil – my favorite.  Morgenster has won international awards for their olive oil.  You can sit in the most elegant setting and learn all about the process of making olive oil while you taste their oils (try the truffle!), munch on different types of olives, sample olive pastes and sip their excellent wines. From the outdoor vine-shaded tasting tables you look over a pond busy with bird life and directly up at Helderberg Mountain.  


Oil in hand, we drive up the road to another beautiful and impressive wine estate, Lourensford, to buy cheese (they won best cheddar in the world) and freshly roasted coffee. 
Lourensford Wine Tasting


Nancy choosing cheese
 Back at the house Nancy downloads hundreds of photos.  It is warm enough to sit and eat dinner on my patio by candlelight.  I point out the Southern Cross bright above us and teach Nancy how to determine due South -- the way my father taught me.


Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Flying to Cape Town

Our flight from Johannesburg is delayed because of Hadada Ibis on the runway.  Someone is sent to chase them off.  When I lived in Kenya, small planes often had to buzz a bush airstrip to frighten off animals  before they could land safely.  It was expected.  But I am now on a big commercial jet in a busy international airport.  Rather tickled by the unexpected….the idea that birds are causing our delay.  I seem to have had a “thing” with birds the past couple of years.  But that’s a long story…

Last night there was an intimate party for Deb hosted by Mark Read, the gallery owner.  Friends and buyers were invited.  A casual yet elegant affair on the rooftop of the gallery which is decorated  in what I like to think of as African Chic. An open fire blazed in the centre, Deborah’s Sentinel Sculptures stood at the edges, there were padded couches, waiters with salmon and caviar. The lights of Johannesburg suburbs spread out below us and the night sky was above.


Me and Deborah

Chatting to William Kentridge and his wife Anne at the party

One of Deborah's Sentinel Sculptures and lights of Johannesburg
 

There were speeches in praise of Deborah. People have been so moved and impressed by her work.  I was the proud “big sister” mingling with the guests – enjoying reconnecting with folk I haven’t seen in a while and meeting new people who had connections to my earlier life in Johannesburg.  Two couples with strong environmental and conservation interests had recently returned from Kenya with tales of Lamu, Lake Turkana, Ol Donyo Wuas.  It felt like old times.

And now I am in the air again, my body hurtling to another place I know well -- Helderberg Village (a retirement community) in Somerset West where I have kept the house my parents lived in before they died.  Nancy and I will stock up on groceries at the airport before the taxi meets us -- so sensible to have a Woolworths with its excellent food department right there in the airport!  And then, once I get to the house I will need to walk a fair way through the village to the garage where I keep an old car while I am in the States, and reconnect the battery.  I have left myself notes so I won’t muddle the positive and negative …. 


My little garden is doing well. Back of Table Mountain in the distance.
 

Sunday, April 17, 2011

PRESENCE -- the Exhibition

Friday  8th April. 

It takes well over an hour to drive from Deb’s Magaliesberg home into Johannesburg --a city built on gold.  We point out distant yellow mine-dumps to Nancy and drive through the northern suburbs. It’s a trip down memory lane for me.  We point out the house my grandmother owned, homes of friends, places I’d visited countless times as a child.  These lush Johannesburg suburbs represent one of the largest man-made forests in the world.  So different from the Magaliesberg, in the Cradle of Mankind, where it is still  mainly indigenous bush – rocky hills and yellow grasslands punctuated by scrubby bush and deep river valleys where old stinkwood trees, figs and acacias clump together.

We arrive at the Everard Read gallery.  It is comprised of two buildings across a road from each other.  Deborah’s work pretty much fills both buildings.


 

 A radio interviewer said that he believes Presence is the largest  solo show ever staged in Johannesburg.  Deborah has made most of the works over the past year. It is a staggeringly impressive achievement, and somehow seems even more so when you meet Deborah who is so petite, so unassuming. 


Her exhibition includes bronze sculptures huge and small, large oil paintings, drawings and etchings. The work is exquisitely displayed through many spacious rooms -- pale walls and floors and masses of light. Each room has a different theme, a different feel.

I was expecting to be impressed, but nothing could quite have prepared me for the power and the beauty of her work.  The way each piece speaks to you on some very primal level, deep and universal, while at the same time inviting  an extremely personal relationship to the art.  There is a stillness in her work. A stillness of depth.  She has captured the pure essence of things, something elemental and knowing.  

         I was speechless.  I wanted to immerse myself in each work, contemplate it in silence. 
Become it.






 











Deborah and Bridget in the gallery

The sisters surrounded by family and friends



You wind up a curving ramp into an enormous oval room and there is ...
Deborah's huge bronze Artemis with her three dogs,
Her bow is unstrung.  Her eyes are closed and her left hand
reaches forward with intent and purpose.  The dogs lead her. 
She is moving forward into an unknown future, with clarity and focus. 





Connected -- somewhat!

Excuse the silence! It's been a matter of technology, or rather lack of.  I am writing this in a holiday cottage at Keurboomstrand at the coast.  It is night.  There is no power (temporarily, I hope).  We have one candle.  I am wearing a little headlamp to see my keyboard.  Talk about the dedicated blogger!  

Note the shells collected today
The sound of surf is loud through the open glass doors.  There is a full moon.  Nancy and I have watched it rise through a pink and mauve evening sky until the night darkened and now moonlight bathes the ocean in silver and catches the curve of the waves just before they break -- bright metallic arcs shooting along the beach. And nothing but sand and water (and the crash of the waves) between us. 


Nancy's shot
 This poetic description was interrupted by a call from Nancy – I have just rescued her from a baboon spider (the size of Texas, she says) which was in her bedroom.

Late afternoon Keurbooms Beach


But ...  I must start at the beginning of my trip. The will has been there, but not the way.  I have been writing and photographing.  Hopefully I can now finally post some of it.




Thursday 7th April  Magaliesberg

My first morning in South Africa. Dappled sunlight and the sound of doves in the pecan trees. Deborah, Nancy and I breakfast outside in the courtyard of Deborah’s country home. Poached eggs, baby tomatoes and fresh basil from the garden, toast and frothy cappuccino laced with a splash of Amarula (a South African liqueur made from marula berries – a bit like Bailey’s cream).  Onyx and Nubia, Deborah’s huge black Great Danes, lie at our feet.  



Courtyard of Deborah's home

Years ago Deborah made a sculpture of a dog with a triangle on its forehead. Much later she got Nubia. In the centre of the puppy’s forehead, the fur grew differently and formed the perfect shape of a triangle. This sort of thing happens a lot in Deborah’s art and her life.  All kinds of connections, and serendipity and revelations.  She will often make a piece of art and only later in time realize the true meaning and significance of her work and how it relates to, or even foreshadows her life. 

Deb with dogs

Later in day we take the dogs for a walk up the valley.  They bound up the red dirt road, drink from the stream which flows over rocks and around the roots of old trees, and race off into the veldt following the scents of who knows what.  It feels so right to be back in this unspoiled piece of Africa, so reminiscent of my childhood.  Often there are baboons on the cliffs and I have picked up guinea fowl feathers and porcupine quills on the road.  On one of my visits last year I even found three impressive quartz crystals lying as though in wait for me.  They now sit on my bedroom windowsill in Durham alongside little groupings of rocks I’ve collected from various parts of the world  (the shore of the Ganges, the base of Mt. Longonot in Kenya ….)  They help me feel connected to places which have spoken to me.

Tomorrow we go into Johannesburg to see Deborah’s exhibition.  I am ready!!!

Okay, so here I am gallantly writing this blog, having a fab time with Deb in the Magaliesberg and ready to post today’s entry.  But, …. No internet!!   Deb has no land-line, no T.V.  The cables keep getting stolen for the copper.  It was true when we lived in Kenya also.  We used to buy lovely copper wire bracelets along the sides of country roads in Kenya.  Above us bare telephone posts stood silent.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Leaving on a Jet Plane

"All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go!"  This song was written by John Denver in 1966.  I was sixteen that year and had never been on a plane.  I used to lie on the lawn of my family's Johannesburg home and look up at jet trails in the blue sky.  Flying seemed so romantic, so exotic to me. How I longed to be high up there, flying  to some unknown destination.

And now I travel a lot and dislike flying more all the time.  What happened to the romance?  NPR had a call-in program yesterday about why people hate the airlines.  Perhaps I'd enjoy it more if I traveled business class or if I didn't do such long hauls, or if there were no issue with baggage weight limits or if I didn't have to take off my shoes at security, empty my water bottle, take out my laptop, stand in queues and then sit cramped in an overbooked flight.  I did one horrendous trip squeezed between two very large people who could only fit into their seats with the arm rests raised. I shrunk into the center of my seat, pulled in my arms and tried to concentrate on yoga breathing.  I hope for more space on this flight.

I have packed and unpacked.  Pruned to meet the weight limit. My carry-on bulges with bags of vitamins and pills, carefully counted for 7 weeks away. When I was much younger there would have been lots of make-up, my hairdryer, perhaps some fancy high heels.  Then there were the years it would have had diapers and baby food.  I guess, though, through all of the stages of my life, there would have been my necklaces.


Saturday, April 2, 2011

Serendipity

I leave on Tuesday.  It’s a punishing trip.   I fly from RDU to Atlanta  and then take Delta non-stop  to Johannesburg.  It’s one of the longest flights in the world – a little over 17 hours.  Nancy, who will be coming from Boston meets me in Atlanta.  She wanted a window seat to look down on Africa as we fly south.  
 
Coming this route, the first view of Africa is usually the dry, desolate vastness of Namibia  -- awesome and mesmerizing in its tones of ochre, umber and charcoal.  An otherworldly geography.   Years ago I traveled up the Skeleton Coast where chilled waves crash on dark stones, on old shipwrecks and gleaming seals.  I climbed the desert dunes of Sousiesvlei at sunrise ---  my footprints the first to disturb sharp-edged curves of orange sand against a pitiless blue sky. 


I will have an aisle seat and an ambien.  Even then I have a battle sleeping.   Another option would be to watch movies.  You can pretty much fit in 5 during the trip.

 
When we arrive in Johannesburg we will catch the Gautrain from the airport to Sandton to meet my sister, Deborah.  This super modern high-speed train was completed in time for the World Cup. A sleek silver streak whipping past suburbs and slums.

 
We will go to Deborah's exhibition.  Two days ago I listened to a podcast of a radio interview with her.  The interviewer was in awe at the amount  and variety of work she has produced over the past year for this exhibition at the Everard Reed Gallery.  Two buildings filled with her work.   I am bound to tear up at the emotion of  seeing  it.  I have promised her that I will not to look at photos ahead of time.  That I will wait for the full impact.  

 
A surprise package arrived for me last week from Nancy.  It was a beautiful and substantial catalog celebrating 25 years at the Caversham Press of South Africa.  Nancy had bought the catalog when she went to
an exhibition at Boston University --"Three Artists at The Caversham Press  - Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge", .  She was struck by the serendipity that this was in her home town at precisely the time she was preparing to travel to South Africa and come with me to “Presence”, Deborah’s  big solo exhibition in Johannesburg. 


Shining Through the Shadows. Deborah Bell
 
 I paged through the catalog and found a full page reproduction of Deborah's “Shining Through the Shadows.”  A shiver went down my spine. This print hangs in my living room in Durham, North Carolina! 

 I’m intrigued by the serendipitous connections which crop up in our lives – like invisible threads weaving and linking things together in some wondrous, unknown ways.  My life feels rich with “serendipity” or  “co-incidence” – whatever  we choose to name it.   It seems as though this may be the way the universe spot-lights things for us, brings them to our attention and makes them more special.  Perhaps it can also be a way that things are revealed to us ---such that they shine through the shadows.