Lisa Call

Metal Pipe Vases by Paula Mccullough

Vases

I have a new obsession in art buying – metal pipe vases by PaulaArt. They are absolutely fabulous. I love the energy in these recycled functional art pieces.

Honestly – I’m a bit obsessed about them. But look at this photo – it’s pretty hard to resist:

Just fabulous.

I’ve written about purchasing art from Paula before (like here and here) and still love my gutter pencil holders also.

This year, I think everyone on my holiday shopping list should get vases. So very cool.

Wall Art

I recently combined some new art purchases with some previous ones to create this grouping in my bedroom. I love the orange on purple.

This artwork is by
Robert Rickard (a find at the Cherry Creek Art Festival this year)

Tracy Helgeson and Tina Mammoser

Nicole Hyde

I couldn’t find a good spot in my house to put the top piece by Robert Rickard with the orange pipe vases by Paula Mccullough, which is too bad, as they look fabulous together.

 
Buying art is a joyful thing. Having it on my walls to enjoy for years to come is even better.

Love the lines in this photo
 

The Photos

I’ve uploaded my Santa Fe vacation photos to smugmug – you can see them all here: Northern New Mexico 2010. I’ve added a few to this post to entice you.

I love Northern New Mexico and having grown up there, I think it is the most beautiful place on earth.

The Activities

In addition to eating a lot and working and spending time reading and relaxing in our hotel room we also did some of the tradition Santa Fe things:

- A visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum
- Viewing the art at the New Mexico Museum of art (2 galleries were close and a 3rd had an exhibit I saw last May, so this was a short visit).
- A lovely walk along an arroyo in southern Santa Fe
- A beautiful drive up along the high road to taos
- Hanging out at the plaza
- Visiting galleries at the Railyard
- Hanging out at the park
- A shopping trip to Trader Joes (we don’t have them in Colorado)
- Thrift store shopping

The Food

These are the places where we ate this trip. All excellent restaurants and highly recommended:

- Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen
- Tuneup Cafe
- Blue Corn Cafe & Brewery
- Baskin and Robbins
- Pantry Restaurant (twice – because it was too late to have lunch at the Shed – bummer)
- Il Vicino Wood Oven Pizza
- Chocolate Maven Bakery & Cafe
- Jambo Cafe
- Dunkin Donuts (for nostalgic purposes)
- The French Pastry Shop
- Rancho de Chimayo

Near the Plaza in Santa Fe
 

Camel Rock
 

The badlands in Northern New Mexico
 

Truchas Peaks

Day 7 – The Free Day

It’s been a while since I posted any photos from South Africa. I do plan on getting through all 21 days of the tour eventually, this is just a low priority task at the moment, one for times when I’m too tired for the studio.

Day 7 of the South African Tour was a free day while we were in the Drakensburg, the mountains in central part of the country. I chose to spend my free day hiking and was happy Barb and Jessie invited me to join them on a hike toward Cathedral Peak. We didn’t aim for the top but to get a great view of the peak.

It was a beautiful day and the hike was gorgeous. These photos bring back only wonderful fond memories.

[For new readers - I spent a month in South Africa in August - had a fabulous time on the arts and crafts tour - you can see previous posts here.]

The Hike To Cathedral Peak

This photo was taken about an hour into the hike. We’d done a bunch of up and had a bunch more to go.

A bit later looking back to where we came from.

Up the valley – looking back again to the start. Notice the difference on the 2 sides of the valley – one green – one brown – amazing the effect of the sun!

The smoke in the distance is controlled grass fires – they do that a lot. Also the peaks in the background are the escarpment that gently slopes down towards the west. Funky thing escarpments.

And finally – after a lot more up that originally anticipated (I think 2 1/2 hours but might have been 3) we see Cathedral Peak. It was amazing!

Very rocky – just like colorado.

The view over the valley.

Someone thought we were dinner.

The dark streak is a burned grass area.

Hiking back down (much faster than going up).

Then I started taking photos of the grass.

Isn’t grass cool!!!

Love the splotch of green grass in the sea of brown. These colors heavily influenced the fabric I dyed for my South African Impressions textile paintings.

It was a fabulous day. We had a long leisurely lunch after the hike then walked back to our camp – another 1/2-hour of walking. Or at least that is what I remember – it was a big walking day.

This was definitely one of the highlights for me on this trip.

I will be giving a talk entitled “Facebook, Twitter and Blogging, Oh My!” on November 15th as part of the Fiber Arts Telesummit.

The little blurb for my talk:

In this presentation Lisa will discuss how textile artists can benefit from the new social media. She’ll cover both the marketing and sales aspects of an active online presence in addition to focusing on the personal, artistic and other less intangible benefits of social marketing. Pondering such questions such as: Why join Facebook? What do I write about on my blog? How do I find readers? What is the purpose of Twitter? How are Facebook and Twitter different? Does any really care what I had for dinner? And more!

The telesummit is being presented by Art of the Song Creative Radio and Eric Maisel. They have an early bird registration deal until October 31st. You can sign up for the entire telesummit or just the talks that interested you. For more information and sign up details: click here.

I’m not sure yet what time I’ll be talking but I’d guess it’ll be in the afternoon on November15th. As soon as I have details I’ll post them.

Although this summit is for fiber artists my talk will be directed at all artists – not just fiber artists. Social media and blogging is for all of us.

I’m looking forward to giving this talk as it’s a subject I have much passion.

 
PS – I am not being paid to give this talk, instead the link to the telesummit is an affiliate link, meaning if you click it and decide to sign up and I’ll get a portion of the fees you pay. So while not necessary, I’d appreciate you using my link to sign up should you choose to join the call.

An Adventure with Frans

August 7th was the day to see San Rock Art in the caves with our guide Frans, an anthropologist and rock art specialist. There are around 20,000 individual rock paintings at 500 different cave and overhang sites in the Drakensburg.

After a rather adventurous hike (Frans might benefit from a GPS) we found the location of the first cave (really more of an overhang). Not visible in the photo but it’s to the right:

 

Before we started up, first a stop at the waterfall for everyone to catch up. This is one of the very few photos of me taken in South Africa:

 

Another view of our destination – we had to go up to about the level of the white cliffs on the right hand side of the photo. Note the taller mountains in the background also:

 

And finally – the paintings. I can’t recall how old these are, somewhere around 1000-4000 years old I think but I didn’t write it down. It is very difficult to date because there is almost no carbon in the paint to date. (click on the photos for a larger image to see the art better):

 

An Eland:

 

Running people. Frans talked for quite a while about the paintings and it was absolutely fascinating. He might not be the best at directions but he certainly knew his rock art paintings.

 

We sat in the cave for quite a while listening to his stories. The roof of the cave also caught my attention:

 

Cathedral Hotel

We had lunch at the Cathedral Hotel after our long hike. In my opinion this was one of the best meals of the trip.

I’m not a fan of pineapple but they had a pineapple, tomato and cucumber salad that was delish. And for dessert – home made icecream and milk tart (like custard) – I had 3 servings – yum yum. (I ended up gaining 5 pounds on this trip – buffets can be evil things – oink).

The Cathedral Hotel is even closer up near Cathedral Peak than Didima Camp where we were sleeping. The view was stunning (Cathedral Peak is the one to the far right):

 

Another Adventure with Frans

After lunch Frans said he knew another closer place to see some rock art that was a shorter walk so we loaded back into the bus and headed off to this secret location.

When we got down to the river he noted “er, there was less water last time”. There was no way to walk along the river to see the paintings.

Well except I wasn’t to be deterred and started to crawl along this ledge and was able to find the paintings (you can see the last couple folks crawling back along the ledge in the center of this photo):

 
Only 4 people followed me, everyone else waded across the river to try to see them from the other side. With Frans pointing things out from the other side we were able to location the human figures and 3 eland. I didn’t bring my camera on the ledge so no photos of that art.

After crawling back (there was about 2 feet of clearance) I also took of my shoes and waded across the river as there was more rock art on the other side.

Well except not really – it had been destroyed or worn away by the cattle. All that was left were 2 legs about an inch high.

I did find the rocks to be beautiful so it wasn’t a wasted trip across the water:

The Views

The walk back to the bus afforded us some beautiful views of the valley and Cathedral peak:

Didima Camp

After the hike we rested in our rooms and enjoyed the view of Cathedral peak before another big buffet for dinner (if I never see another buffet again I’d probably be okay).

 
This was one of my most favorite days of the tour. I got to go hiking, Frans was delightful, the food was amazing, the weather was gorgeous. I am definitely a mountain girl.

Travel

The 5th day of the South Africa, August 6, we traveled in our big bus from Johannesburg down to the Drakensburg Park in Kwq-Zulu Natal.

It was our first ride south in Johannesburg and it look similar to other directions. Lots of houses.

There was a layer of smoke over the southern part of Johannesburg that I hadn’t noticed much in the city. You can kinda see it in the 2 photos below. Lots of fires to heat and cook results in this layer of yuck in the air. Kinda like Denver in the winter.

Love these duplexes with each half painted a different color. And a huge sea of them.

 

And like everywhere else – gotta have the satellite TV. Somethings are universal.

 
The drive south was beautiful. We took the scenic route by the Sterkfontein Dam – an interesting combination of water storage and hydro electric station that is part of the Tugela-Vaal Water Project. They pump the water around depending on if they need water or electricty.

Mostly it was just beautiful to drive by for this tourist.

 

Water.

 

More Water.

The mechanism to pump the water back up the mountain is here. But it can’t be seen as they covered it all back up after building it. Very cool.

Lunch

We had lunch near Winterton at a place called Thokosiza, shops and an amazing lunch. We had a brownie that everyone talked about for the rest of the trip as it won the award for best dessert. I failed to take photos of my food, but we had some amazing meals.

While waiting for our lunch we got to watch the Weaver birds. We had a lot of bird folks on the trip and I have to admit I’m not much of a bird person although I enjoyed the few that made themselves very obvious.

Weaver

 

The nests of the Weavers. Pretty clever houses hanging in the tree.

 
There were aleo all over South Africa and many beautiful flowering ones at Thokosiza. I did some sketching and plenty of photography also. We were all swarming about taking photos of the birds and flowers (and shopping).

To Cathedral Peak

We stopped into a rug weaving/candle making place nearby and then loaded back in the bus for the drive up into the Drakensburg mountains. One of the top holiday destinations in SA and for good reason – it’s incredibly beautiful.

Our destination was to Didima Camp- near Cathedral Peak.

The drive up up to mountains was amazing. Through a tribal area (Zulu? I wrote that down but later remember being told they were not zulu so not sure).

I took a zillion photos of the homes and when I get them processed and up on smugmug you will see many more.

I’m pretty sure views like these would be rather expensive in a place like California. Gorgeous!

 

Photos out the bus window are an artform that I sometimes mastered and sometimes didn’t.
 

The mountains had a very similar feel to the Colorado Rockies but also very different. They were gorgeous. It was late afternoon when we arrived.

First view of Cathedral Peak.
 

Cathedral Peak from my hotel room – my view for the next 3 nights.

 
Just 3 more nights and my incredible trip to South Africa will wrap up and I’ll head back to the US. I haven’t had the desire to do much blogging while here as my head is swimming with all we have seen – arts & crafts plus much culture and politics and landscape and history.

It’s all fabulous and much to process.

We just got back from visiting a project where they are doing potato stamping on fabrics and making cushions and other household items. We pretty much cleaned them out of stock, which is generally the story everywhere we go. They said it was their lucky day. Ours also.

Photos will be posted some day, after I’m home and sort through them all.

In the meantime, the photo above is of some rock art paintings we saw a few weeks back in the Drakensburg. Beautiful.

Cradle of Humankind

Today was a trip through a rhino and lion reserve to the Cradle of Humankind – one of eight World Heritage sites in South Africa.

The Cradle of Humankind Site comprises a strip of a dozen dolomitic limestone caves containing the fossilized remains of ancient forms of animals, plants and most importantly, hominids.

At least seven of the twelve sites have yielded hominid remains. In fact, together these cave sites have produced over 850 hominid fossil remains, so that to date they represent one of the world’s richest concentrations of fossil hominid bearing sites.The scientific value of this area lies in the fact that these sites provide us with a window into the past, to a time when our earliest ancestors were evolving and changing. Scientists have long accepted that all humans had their origins in Africa.

 
We received a private tour by one of the archaeologist around the above photographed dig site. Very interesting stuff for sure.

Animals

As we had to pass through a game reserve to get to the dig site we got to see some animals also the way.

Rhinos and Warthogs

Cape Town Zebras

Zebra, Sable Antelope, Ostrich and maybe something else

Landscape

I love the grass prairie in this area, which they of course do not call a prairie but something else – probably something with the word “veld” (for felt) in it. Either way the landscape is beautiful and definitely inspiration for my South African Impressions art project.

Travels

I take a lot of photos out of the bus windows as we travel down the road. Hundreds of them. When I get home and have a proper computer to work on I’ll be sorting through them all and putting all of my photos up on smugmug.

Here’s one of my favorite roadside photos from today’s journey. It’s not perfectly focused as many of these are taken at 100 km/hr but they are okay-ish.

Need a muffler?

The sign says “Mr Exhaust” and the post to the right in front of the white pickup are all the mufflers.
 

Timeline

We just spent 3 nights up in the mountains (in the Drakensburg) where I didn’t pay for internet. I’m also not always interested in writing a blog post as our days are packed full of activities.

The result is my blog posts and real-time are now quite out of sync. Tour Day 3, this post, occurred on August 4th. I’m going to continue to post the days in order on my blog and not worry they might be a week or so behind reality.

We are in Durban for the next day and then are heading towards some animals where I plan on seeing a lion, even though I’m told that is difficult, which is fine, I still plan on seeing a lion (or 3 or 5).

Mapula Embroidery

Women of the Mapula Embroidery project in their classroom

 
This morning we drove out to Winterveld to visit the women of the Mapula Embroidery project.

With the help of the Soroptimists the Mapula Embroidery project was started in the early 1990s (before the end of apartheid) with the goal of enriching and empowering the women of Winterveld.

As we drove up the work was hanging on the wash lines waving in the breeze.

The subject matter of the embroideries vary and range from South African animals and plants to politics, health issues (AIDS, cholera, etc) to gender dis-empowerment and male authority. Individual expression is encouraged and the results are quite interesting.

These are some smaller pieces they also had for sale, some were made into cushions but many were not yet finished. The subject matter of these smaller pieces were almost all African animals as they are sold in tourist shops around South Africa.

This is one of the pieces I purchased and the woman that did the work. It was one of only 2 pieces with a white background instead of black and it is much larger than most.

I’m going to write more about about this project after I return home as it is quite interesting and if there is interested I’d like to see if I can bring some of these embroideries to the states and help sell them as it is an excellent project. Although that is something to think about after I return home.

Ndebele Village

In the afternoon we visited a Ndbele Village also near Pretoria.

They had recreated housing in styles over several hundred years, all of which were interesting and I loved the shapes and designs. The traditional Ndbele still paint their houses and we have driven by many of these in our travels.

Misc

A few other photos of from the day:

 
All of the house photos from the previous post were also taken on this day on the drive up to Winterveld and down to the Ndebele Village

Housing in Soweto

Yesterday I mentioned we went through Soweto and the only photo I took was of the shantytown. While a large population does live in these conditions the majority of that area is houses. Most are smaller houses with 4 rooms but there are also very wealthy areas with homes costing over a million Rand.

There are also some smaller multi family homes called elephant houses that were very interesting and usually quite beautiful. On each end was a 2 room living space and in the center is a 3 room apartment. Most often each of the 3 families painted their section of the house a different color, resulting in some beautiful homes. I haven’t seen these anywhere except in Soweto so far. (Here’s someone else’s photo)

There are also buildings that look very much like condos in the US (although much more interesting colors) and single gender hostels (long desolate buildings with single rooms that aren’t as inviting and often without electricity – a photo).

Housing Shortage

Our local tour guide gave an interesting talk about the housing situation in South Africa and the gist of the situation is they cannot build them fast enough. They have programs to give government homes to those that have no income and prorated mortgages for others. There are just not enough houses as of yet.

Since the first democratic election in 1994 the government has build over 2 million homes but they estimate an addition 5 – 7 million backlog. They have large numbers of immigrants from neighboring countries that adds to the housing crisis.

Houses

I find the 4 room houses interesting. I love the simple lines and have taken a zillion photos of them – mostly from the bus as it goes down the highway so they aren’t the best quality.

I suspect I’ll be taking many more house photos as the weeks go by and occasionally I’ll post a group of photos of them.