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Since our man often combined different views in a single image, (like the exaggerated buildings in the Hermanus panel) I figured in the Lion’s Head panel he’d done the same. So I started close to it and worked my way backwards to the water and the Postmodern malaise down by the docks….
Lion's Head (with a Damien Hirst dot)
scratching around...
We took the Jeep over the mountains to Franschoek to check out the Solms Delta Oesfees, where we heard some really good local music. I wanted to see my chinas in the Radio Kalahari Orkes, who I haven’t heard for a long time. They drove down from Jo’burg in a 1973 Kombi and played a blistering hot set that was an explosion of joy. The biggest figure in their musical heritage is a guy called Dawie de Lange, a 1930’s rebel boeremusikant who was banned from the airwaves by the Afrikaner establishment. I wonder if Pierneef ever heard him?
Die Orkes skop gat!
Hermanus – my home town for the last two years – is the southernmost site.
Two things strike me about about this panel: He made the buildings look a lot larger than they are, and the total absence of the human figure. In those days the harbour was a hive of fishing activity. The photographic museum nearby has great pics from those days of trophy fishermen alongside their monsters from the deep. Now, sadly, you’d be hard pressed to find fish in Walker Bay. Except of course for whales. Which aren’t supposed to be fish….
Hermanus
Cape summer hues: Those what-colour-is-that grey greens of the Cape mountains in summer. And the ubiquitous mauve. Pierneef got those mountains in the background dead right.
For a few years now I’ve been on a mission to find and document the original sites of Pierneef’s station Panels. The paintings, done in the early 1930’s originally hung in the Joburg Station but are now housed in the Pierneef Museum in Graaf Reinet. There are 28 landscapes. Pierneef was in his early 40’s when he did them and they represent a highpoint in his career – the point where subject matter, content and style coalesce into something really strong. They secured his place as SA’s leading painter and ensured a widespread popularity.
Today we tend still to look at them and sense that they convey the essence of the landscape. By revisiting the sites, I’m trying to find out what’s left of them – how much remains after 80 years of development? Does Pierneef’s sense of those places still exist? Are they really as grand as he made them or was he a hopeless Romantic?
HOW TO DO IT?
It took me a while to figure out that I would do work that relates to the site itself and then work that relates to Pierneef’s original paintings. When I get to a site, I do watercolours and drawings as an initial response. Later in the studio I work up paintings from photographs. But there’s also a set of works that responds to Pierneef’s paintings. These usually take the form of a modified Pierneef – the original injected with some image that seems appropriate to the place.
RUSTENBURG KLOOF
The first place I went to, about 2 hours NW of Jo’burg. Easy enough to find – it’s on the map. It’s a ‘plesieroord’ with well tended lawns and bungalows. The cliff face stares right out at you and looking at Pierneef’s original painting, it was easy to figure out exactly where he was when he did the initial studies. (He did hundreds of preparatory drawings.)
This is Pierneef’s original Rustenburg Kloof Panel:
Rustenburg Kloof. Oil on Canvas. 141cmx126cm
This is my oil painting of the site:
Rustenburg Kloof. Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.
And this is the modified version:
Biker 3, watercolour 17.5 x 13.5 cm
Travels with Pierneef 