SA is Charming

afternoon tea @ Castle Leslie (N-IRL) after our spa treatments

My sister Cheryl, her daughter Jill and I like to take girls-only trips together. Las tres amigas.

Unburdened by the more masculine sensibilities and interests of husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, we get to fully indulge in the things that we consider essential and our menfolk consider a waste of time whilst traveling. Namely shopping, spas, shopping, lingering over afternoon tea, shopping, sitting on the beach or in front of a fire with a good book and a cocktail, and shopping.

St. Bernard blessing a St. Bernard!

All that shopping means that we frequently find some piece of jewelry that, when purchased by each of us as keepsakes, will forever remind us of our trips together. Sometimes we were lucky - like when we found St. Bernard medals on a tres amigas ski trip to Sun Valley, Idaho. St. Bernard is the patron saint of mountaineers and we all love dogs. Perfect! Or the shamrock and Giant's Causeway charms we found at a gift shop in Northern Ireland that we could just clip onto our birthday charm bracelets in situ. No waiting.

This will end up on my birthday charm bracelet someday!

Other times we chose not to leave it to luck and we would buy something before the trip to wear during the holiday. Like the Me & Ro beach charm necklaces we all bought in Soho before our Mexican birthday fiesta holiday. We had the silver shell charm engraved with "Cabo" once we got back home.

my birthday charm bracelet

Or the "Paris to Florence" Tiffany charm we had made to wear on a big birthday trip. It is engraved "50-45-15" on the flip side to commemorate my 50th, Cheryl's 45th and Jill's 15th birthdays.

HBD in SA, tres amigas!

My sister Cheryl came to visit me in South Africa from the U.S. right before her birthday in March and my niece Jill came to visit me before her birthday in July. In between, I spent my May birthday in South Africa.

Jill (@ the Apartheid Museum) shares a July 18 birthday with Nelson Mandela!

Technically it wasn't a true tres amigas trip since we weren't all in South Africa at the exact same time. It was more like two dos amigas trips back to back, but I decided I wasn't going to let a little technicality like that stand in the way of some jewelry. So I had three Africa charms made with animal cut-outs to commemorate their visits to SA. Jill's favorite African animal is the giraffe, Cheryl's is the elephant and I love the rhino.

Las tres amigas in Florence

USA bound for the month of July!

Leaving today for Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and California to visit with family and friends for the whole month of July! Woo hoo!

Independence Day fireworks. Authentic Mexican food in Denver and LA and Tex-Mex in Austin! Continuous electricity. Binge-watching Masterpiece Theater. Serial pod-casting Serial. Heat and humidity. Kansas City BBQ. Austin barbeque. Cheap electronics. Christmas in July with family (but sadly not Vince, Lou & Serge)! The Pacific Ocean. The Rocky Mountains. Summer!

And since I'll be Out of Africa, a well-deserved blog-cation!!! See you in August, Africa!

It's a wrap on the 2014-2015 Volvo Ocean Race!

cruising past the V&A on our way back to the RCYC after the in-port race

After an initial leg start in Alicante, Spain on October 11, 2014, the around the world Volvo Ocean Race finally finished on June 22, 2015 in Gothenberg, Sweden. Total race distance, 38,739 nm!

 







It was a blast to follow online and a special thrill to visit the Race Village, to see the boats in action and to meet some of the sailors while the race was in port at the V&A in Cape Town last November. 





The results:

Congratulations Abu Dhabi! Great effort Teams Alvimedica and SCA!

The Rose-winged Parakeet Project

The Rose-ringed Parakeet is an invasive parrot species which inhabits urban areas of South Africa. It is currently listed as a Category 2 invasive species in the National Environmental Management Biodiversity Act.

Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand are launching the Rose-ringed Parakeet Project to firstly locate parakeet roosting/breeding sites and secondly investigate the size and distribution range of the Rose-ringed parakeet population in Gauteng. This will be complemented by parallel studies (in association with European researchers and ParrotNet) focused on the behaviour of these birds in Gauteng. This will improve our understanding of the ecology and behaviour of the species in South African urban environments and ensure that informed decisions are made by policy makers regarding the status and management of this parrot.

Have you seen a Rose-ringed Parakeet? Do you live in Gauteng? Do you want to participate in this project? Then join their Facebook group.

All birders, citizen scientists, outdoor enthusiasts, and members of the public are invited to assist with and collaborate on the project by submitting sightings of these parakeets to the project database. They particularly need information on the exact location of permanent roosting and breeding sites as well as the number of parakeets seen.

Data submission guidelines: Please follow this link to the Google data form, fill it in, and submit. You may submit more than one form for the project. Please fill in all required fields as completely as possible.

If you have photos of Rose-ringed Parakeets, please send them to the Rose-winged Parakeet Project at urbanparakeets@gmail.com.If you have any questions or need further information please contact Craig Symes or Elize Fourie.

The Riel Thing

In July the Bushmans Kloof Nuwe Graskoe Trappers will be flying across the Atlantic to represent South Africa at the World Championships of Performing Arts in Los Angeles. (Coincidentally I will be in L.A. in late July too.)

A dozen pairs of feet, all clad in red veldskoene and white socks tap dancing and twirling. The young dancers who hail from the tiny town of Wupperthal in the Western Cape perform in farm clothes, headscarves and bonnets for the girls and feathered cowboy hats for the boys. 

Their dance is called the Nama Riel and it is being revived in festivals from the Kalahari to the Karoo. It’s a dance-descendant of the old Khoi and San fireside rituals and it became the Saturday Night Fever of sheep shearers and farm workers across the Kalahari and Great Karoo over many generations.

We first saw this unique form of dancing last March in the parade at the Cape Town Carnival. The crowd went wild as they made their way down the street stomping and spinning and kicking up dust -  or in this case, confetti. I was impressed and curious. I had never seen anything like it in South Africa. It reminded me of a cross between Creole Zydeco danced in New Orleans and Appalachian barn-dancing.

But it is a unique form of traditional South African dance. Ya know I love traditional dance! In Mpumalanga the traditional dances are the Gumboots and traditional Shangaan dancing; in Natal it's traditional Zulu and Gumboot. In Cape Town, it is Minstrel dancing, but in Bushmans Kloof in the Cederberg, it is the Nama Riel. The Riel is traditionally a courtship dance. The men imitate farm work and the movement of the animals, while the women imitate domestic tasks. A man might fling his hat up in the air and let it land on the ground; if a woman picks it up and places it on his head, she accepts his advance.

Best of luck in LA, Trappers! Hope to see you again when we're both back in South Africa.

Vladimir Tretchikoff

You see copies of his paintings everywhere in South Africa. Prints hanging on the walls in homes and restaurants, images on cushions and coasters in shops, and exotic women reproduced in jewelry and fashion. I even own a pair of earrings bearing one of his images. Vladimir Tretchikoff.

I had to find out what the connection was between this well-known Russian artist and South Africa. So I googled him. Here are some excerpts from the write-up in Wikipedia:

"Vladimir Grigoryevich Tretchikoff (Владимир Григорьевич Трeтчиков, 26 December [O.S. 13 December] 1913, Petropavlovsk, Russian Empire, now Petropavl in Kazakhstan – 26 August 2006, Cape Town, South Africa) was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time - his painting "Chinese Girl" (popularly known as "The Green Lady") is one of the best selling art prints of the twentieth century. 

Tretchikoff's "Xhosa Warrior" @ Valley Lodge

Tretchikoff was a self-taught artist who painted realistic figures, portraits, still life and animals, with subjects often inspired by his early life in China, Singapore and Indonesia, and later life in South Africa. His work was immensely popular with the general public, but is often seen by art critics as the epitome of kitsch (indeed, he was nicknamed the "King of Kitsch"). He worked in oil, watercolour, ink, charcoal and pencil but is best known for his reproduction prints which sold worldwide in huge numbers. According to his biographer Boris Gorelik, writing in Incredible Tretchikoff, the reproductions were so popular that it was rumoured that Tretchikoff was the world's richest artist after Picasso.

(Interestingly to me), international recognition came in 1937 when he was commissioned by the head of IBM, Thomas Watson, to represent Malaya in an exhibition of international art for which he produced the painting "The Last Divers."

When the Second World War spread to the Pacific in 1940, Tretchikoff became a propaganda artist working for the British Ministry of Information. In February 1942, Tretchikoff was on board a ship evacuating ministry personnel to South Africa. The ship was bombed by the Japanese, and the 42 survivors rowed first to Sumatra, which they found was already occupied by the Japanese Army. They then rowed to Java, which took 19 days, only to find that it too was occupied. Tretchikoff was imprisoned in Serang (where he spent three months in solitary confinement for protesting that as a Russian citizen he ought to be set free), and then was released and spent the rest of the war on parole in Batavia, (now Jakarta), where he worked under supervision of a Japanese artist. Here he met Leonora Schmidt-Salomonson (Lenka) who became his lover and one of his most famous models.

"Ndebele Girl" by Vladimir Tretchikoff

In 1946 he was reunited with his wife and their daughter Mimi in South Africa (they had been successfully evacuated on an earlier boat). He quickly became famous in South Africa thanks to a book that collected his portraits of Asian women and pictures of flowers, and held successful exhibitions in Cape Town and Johannesburg. His fame spread to the United States, where the Rosicrucians of San Jose invited him to launch an American tour. Around 57,000 people saw his show in Los Angeles and 52,000 in San Francisco. In Seattle, a rival show which included Picasso and Rothko was far less attended, to Tretchikoff’s satisfaction. Then he took his show to Canada, where he had an even bigger success. This was followed by a large exhibition in 1962 at Harrods in London where he decided that the Harrods art gallery was too small to accommodate the crowds. He requested and was granted the privilege of having his exhibition in the ground-floor exhibition space. He had more than 205,000 visitors to this exhibition. One of his British admirers, Leslie Rigall, bought a dozen of paintings and designed his new house in Windsor Great Park around them.

"Chinese Girl" by Vladimir Tretchikoff

His famous "Chinese Girl", a 1950 painting featuring Eastern model, Monika Pon-su-san, with blue-green skin, is one of the best selling prints of the twentieth century. Prints of the painting became widespread during the 1950s and 1960s, and the painting was featured in various plays and television programmes: Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), the original set of Alfie, with a drawn moustache in one episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus and an episode of Doctor Who. Other popular paintings of oriental figures were "Miss Wong," "Lady from Orient" and "Balinese Girl." He said of British prima ballerina assoluta, Alicia Markova, who sat for "The Dying Swan," that she was his most stimulating sitter.

Interest in his artworks underwent a resurgence in the late 1990s as part of a revival of 1950s and 1960s retro decor. In 1998 Sotheby's of Johannesburg sold an oil-on-canvas still life for $1800, double what they expected. In 1999 "Zulu Maiden" was expected to fetch $1800 but went for $10,000. In October 2002 another original fetched $18,000 and in May 2008, "Fruits of Bali" fetched $480,000 at Stephan Welz & Co in Cape Town. 

"The Dying Swan"

"Chinese Girl" was purchased at auction in 2013 by the Delaire Graff wine estate in Stellenbosch and is hanging in the art gallery there. The sale stands as the most money ever paid for a Tretchikoff painting -  nearly £1,000,000 at Bonhams, London. (The previous record was "Red Jacket," which fetched £337,250 in October 2012, also at Bonhams.)

my "Chinese Girl" earrings

He suffered a stroke in 2002 that left him unable to paint, and died on 26 August 2006 in Cape Town, his home since 1946. The South African National Gallery never acquired an original Tretchikoff because they did not "really regard Tretchikoff as a South African artist". In Esme Berman’s definitive book on ”Art and Artists of Southern Africa” he is dismissed in little more than two lines, under the heading ”popular artists.” Tretchikoff once said that the only difference between himself and Vincent van Gogh was that Van Gogh had starved whereas he had become rich.

Soon after his death the Tretchikoff Trust was established. The Trusts hosts workshops for teenagers throughout South Africa. The Trust is based on Tretchikoff's life motto "Express your passion, do whatever you love, take action, no matter what". 

The South African National Gallery in Cape Town

In 2011, the first Tretchikoff retrospective was held at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Curated by Andrew Lamprecht, it proved to be one of the most successful shows in the gallery's history."

Now I know. 

Icon jewelry

tribal jewelry hanging on the headboard

It really hasn't been all that hard to keep my promise to myself to not invest in expensive jewelry while living in South Africa. For one thing, it is a much more casual lifestyle here than the one I enjoyed in my old life in the US. And secondly, the tribal and craft jewelry here is so fun and festive ... and cheap! I have hardly felt the deprivation at all.












For instance I love collecting these icon necklaces. Made from photographic images framed in hammered tin, they pack alot of pizazz for a very small price.

Made in South Africa, the photographs feature iconic images like the ubiquitous Lucky Star pilchard can labels in these earrings. (Lucky Star Pilchards are the South African artistic equivalent of Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans in the U.S.)  Or these colorful shweshwe kanga cloth images adorning this necklace.

Nerson Mandela photographed by Jürgen Schadeberg

My favorite pieces though feature the photographs of  Jürgen Schadeberg, a South African photographer and artist. Jürgen Schadeberg was born in Berlin in 1931. In 1950, he moved to South Africa to rejoin his family and joined Drum magazine as official photographer and layout artist.

Schadeberg became a teacher and mentor to some of the most creative South African photographers of his time, like Bob Gosani, Ernest Cole and later Peter Magubane. As one of the few white photographers who photographed daily life among the black community, he became knowledgeable about black life and culture. As a result, he captured on film the beginnings of the freedom movement, the effects of apartheid and the vibrancy of township life.

Miriam Makema photographed by Jürgen Schadeberg

Schadeberg photographed many historic and pivotal events in the 1950s among them the Defiance Campaign of 1952, the 1956 Treason Trial, the Sophiatown removals of 1955, the Sophiatown jazz and social scene, the Sharpeville funeral of 1960 and pictures of Robben Island inmates. Some of the famous people he photographed include Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Trevor Huddleston and Govan Mbeki. He also documented the Fifties jazz legends such as Dolly Rathebe, Kippie Moeketsi, Thandi Klaasen and Miriam Makeba.

He was forced to leave South Africa in 1964 and went to London where he taught and curated photographic exhibitions, notably for the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In 1972, he returned to Africa where he accepted a position as photographer for Christian Aid in Botswana and Tanzania. In 1973 he travelled from Senegal and Mali to Kenya and Zaire to take photographs. In 1984, Schadeberg returned to South Africa. He continues to work as a photo-journalist as well as making documentaries about the black community.

The photographs are not limited to only South African icons either. This necklace - which I like to wear on Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos - features the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.







 

photo from the African Queen Facebook page

I cannot read the very tiny stamped maker's mark on the back of the necklaces so I can't give credit to the actual jewelry designer. But I bought them all at either Art Africa in Parkview or African Queen in Benmore. Oh, I have to find that Tretchikoff necklace!












PS I went back to Art Africa to buy some more necklaces for gifts and I found out the jewelry designer's name is Beverley Price. And you can special order!