“This is a tour of the images that have come to mind in a second chance. Paintings, drawings, maps, found objects all come to light in a journey through unanticipated submission to what was long present ,Makhandzambili, those, our fellows, who went before, the un-echoing gently dripping silent vastness of the prehistoric Sidvwaba Caves, the thundering pouring magnificence of the ancient multiple falls called after that intensively private public person, Queen Victoria – Mosi oa tunya the smoke that thunders. Reflections of a life unexpectedly, redeemed.
When I was 15, I painted a picture of the deep gorge near which we lived and in which I’d spend almost every waking hour. Knowing the wild cat which basked on a high rock. The fish turning enticingly in the stream. The buck disappearing into the bush. Oh the joy of those encounters.
The judge of the competition I entered it in gave it 2nd prize, remarking:” It would have made first, but for it being ‘ too ambitious’. Then I learnt, sadly, to make experience make me, in a long lifelong fruitless quest for some kind of inward perfection.
“I next began to paint at 72. In my Geriatric Renaissance ” , an extraordinary event preceded by a major mental meltdown, in which scent, sight and sound took on a charming immediacy, which thrilled and provoked walking in the night hours , to the consternation of the night staff of the Care Facility I resided in, barefoot, and in the rain, watching the silhouettes of the joyous trees in the old walls of the stoep as they danced in night air. I began to tour the beautiful old neglected garden, with it’s venerable trees, our mortal companions. Just as I had done in the gorge on the edge of which our home once perched.”
