Embedded Files
Acrylic on canvas 120cm x 180cm
Will you be ready when the rain does fall?
Will you be ready when the rain does fall?
Because it still falls.
Because it still falls.
The drought has been coming for a long time.
Time enough is never enough time
For good-time, short-term
Kings and queens
Of the Party.
(Whichever party)
Playing drunken musical chairs is scary
When the silence comes.
Silence except for tiny drops
on tin roofs
On show-off roads
In broken gutters
Then out to sea.
Undrunk.
Rain still falls but the Party never stops:
Someone will get caught in the silence,
In the gentle rain
That still falls
Sometimes.
This is about waiting. We wait for the rain the way we wait for the government (or big business) to rescue us. There had been a “green drought” in the Western Cape for the past three years. In combination with ongoing urban growth and government mismanagement it has turned into a full blown water crisis. Living our daily lives became synonymous with water saving. The well-off and landed classes bought rainwater catchment systems and the rest of us made do with what we were told. We counted minutes in our showers and never used the tub, we had buckets and bowls in sinks and showers to catch the used water to flush toilets. Every action, everything we bought and ate, was measured by how much water was needed to cook or use it. The heavy wait for water and the evasive hysteria from the media and government inevitably slipped through my fingers and onto the canvas.
Work in Progress 1 – The huge canvas waiting in a corner of my Cape Town studio
It happened almost by accident, in between other paintings. I’d begun an enormous painting of Thelma in an ornate black necklace but I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it as it stood. I’d smoothed the canvas with texture paste, applied pretty washes and laid out a structure that really compelled me but I couldn’t work out what happened next. I spent time with my family, waited for insight and we all waited for rain.
Four months passed with little inspiration and even less rain; and ever more hysterical media messages about saving water, not using taps, penalties, bylaws and threats of punitive taxes for living in a city with big, new buildings and small, old dams. There was deathly silence from the politicians whenever it rained though. Perhaps they were hoping we wouldn’t notice it running off the Civic Center, or into the hovels of the people who live under the broken Metrorail station roof next door.
The big painting stumped me. I tried all my favourite things: pure colour, transparent glazes, messy splashes of wet paint over areas that annoyed me. Nada. Only small parts worked. The whole felt thin and unresolvable.
Painting is problem solving. You may have a plan when you start out, but as you go the painting flows or argues with you in no predictable way. Colours fight for dominance, parts of the background refuse to recede, and details in the source image bicker with emerging character of the painting. When I’m really stuck, I find it helps to develop a bit of a martial attitude to the work. I decide to start putting paint on canvas and not stop until the solution appears. I drank a lot of coffee and dug in for about a week.
Eventually I had to do some basic housekeeping or run out of dishes, clothes and patience with the sticky summer heat. I did my weekly load of laundry, filling buckets with water from the washing machine to reuse flushing, mopping and cleaning and keeping my tomato plants alive. I hauled buckets around the awkward old apartment and watched fat drops of water fall from the sky and into the gutters and storm drains outside
Work in Progress 2 – Massive and unsolved… .
Some parts working and others fighting me tooth and nail
After a few days I’d given up on the background, the hibiscus and the necklace several times with no end in sight. The painting was never going to work as it was, so I reexamined Thelma’s face. She is tiny and sweet but her character and will are indomitable. During the photo shoot we’d played with jewellery, dresses and fabric but the thing we’d all loved most was the face paint; which I’d left out of the painting entirely.
When I added the intense cadmium to her face, I also softened the necklace.
Playing with colour and getting to “fiddle with reality” brings me intense joy so I reveled in colour and texture for a while. It’s so good to forget life and chores and politics and fear for a while.
The thing with acrylic though, is that it’s painfully difficult to experiment with it in hot, dry weather. No matter how much glycerin I add, some edge always dries where I least want it to and I have to spend an eternity with ethanol, tiny brushes and earbuds to get it back off if I change my mind.
And it had stopped raining.
At moments like this, artists, engineers, writers and every other flavour of creative must learn to “lean in” or face never finishing anything at all. With the first white streaks on her cheekbones everything started to cohere. I drank more coffee and tried to wallow in the delight of “things coming together”.
Old buildings are not engineered to handle change, especially not in the pipes. The thickened, thrice-used water from 12 apartments was eventually insufficient to wash away the clogging fragments of food and waste. The entire block flooded under a drizzly sky and we all met in the hallways to consult about who had the superintendent's number and how to get out of a building that was ankle deep in stink.
A week later and water poured from the sky outside. My frustration and boredom with lugging buckets of precious liquid around my elderly flat, fighting with 1950s plumbing and shitty water storage found it’s outlet at last, hovering untethered above Thelma’s skin.
How many schools, hospitals, and blue-light brigades was this rain splashing off while I took time away from earning a living to make up for ancient plumbing? How many kids were getting yelled at for splashing in puddles and for leaving taps on? How many porta-pools were folded uselessly away, legally forbidden in every garden, while rain ran riot through gutters and downpipes, and out to sea?
And to pump sea water back onto land: How much money will the failing bureaucracy “reallocate” toward desalinization tenders, and away from hospitals, public works, universities and the very people who could fix the problem?
Work in Progress 5- Water for diamonds, water for gold.
Report abuse