Lisa Call

Taking A Break

The law on inertia (ie Newton’s first law of motion):

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

When I left for vacation my studio time had great momentum and I was also making excellent progress on the art business/marketing stuff.

I had grand ideas that I would continue to want to work on the art business during my month in South Africa so I took along materials (small and light) that would enable me to do that.

Then an “unbalanced force” came into play, namely that of having a great time relaxing and not feeling a need to get stuff done, and I promptly gave up the silly idea that I would Get Stuff Done during that time. I even stopped blogging as I definitely reached a state of rest.

It was excellent, and a well needed break for my usual constant motion.

Moving Again

Then I returned home and found it was quite easy to stay in that state of rest. It was great to just hang out and do very little the last few weeks.

This weekend I made it to the dye studio and created 40 yards of beautiful South African inspired fabric and then today I spent 2 hours in my studio organizing and finishing Structures #100 (it needed the edges finished and the hanging sleeve – I’m about half done with that project).

To that unknown “unbalanced force” that enabled me to get moving again – thank you. I have some ideas what was at play here and they will be good topics for future posts. I need to ponder the situation a bit more also.

South African Impressions

I now have the fabric dyed and will be starting my South African Impressions artwork this weekend after I wrap up a few loose ends on some other artwork.

I’ve started sorting my photos from the trip also and will start doing blog posts picking up where I left off on a day by day journal of the trip. It will be a great way to stay connected with the experience as I am making the artwork.

You can still purchase the South African Impressions art at a discount through the end of September.

For details see here: South African Impressions

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.

Constitution Hill

On Monday, the arts and crafts tour of South Africa started out in Johannesburg with some history. First stop was a tour of Constitution Hill and the new home for the Constitutional Court.

This site was originally a prison with a rather unpleasant past. From the official website:

Constitution Hill is the new home of the Constitutional Court, the protector of our basic rights and freedoms. Constitution Hill is also the site of Johannesburg’s notorious Old Fort Prison Complex, commonly known as Number Four, where thousands of ordinary people were brutally punished before the dawn of democracy in 1994. Many of South Africa’s leading political activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, were detained here.

It’s quite interesting that they chose this spot for the home of the Constitutional Court. They’ve reused the bricks from one of the old cell blocks for one wall of the court.

With a “those that forget their past are doomed to repeat it” theme. I think it’s really quite brilliant and the architecture ingeniously ties the past to the new future for South Africa.

The tour resulted were some excellent opportunities for photos of walls, the inspiration behind my Structures Series. Looking forward to using these photos in my new African Impressions Project.

Old Prison Wall

Court room wall rebuilt from old bricks as a reminder of what the past held. The opposite side of the room symbolizes the future.

Wall in the courtyard in Number 4.

Newtown Cultural Project

Next stop was an artist’s proof studio in a revitalized area in downtown Joburg called the Newtown Cultural Project.

They relocated to this new location after a fire. Very cool how they’ve used the plates salvaaged from that fire in the stairwell.

Soweto

We spent the afternoon on a bus tour through Soweto, a collection of African townships south west of Johannesburg.

High lights were a traditional African lunch (salad and rice for this vegetarian – they eat a lot of meat in South Africa), a tour of Nelson Mandela’s house, a stop by the Hector Pieterson Memorial and a lengthy drive around the area.

It doesn’t all look like photo above, in fact, most of Soweta is not like this, but I wasn’t taking photos and instead enjoying the experience. Now I want to go back and photograph because the houses were mostly simple but the colors were amazing.

The Bushveld Animals

On Saturday Laetitia and her husband took me to the Bushveld, a sub-tropical woodland ecoregion of Southern Africa, an area with well-grassed plains (ie the Veld or “Felt”) dotted by dense clusters of trees and tall shrubs.

The Bushveld is one of the most mineral-rich regions of the world, which is very cool, and even better (at least for what I wanted to see) this area had a lot of animals also.

We went to Dikhololo, a private resort and game reserve where they have removed the Big Five, ie the animals that might want to eat me – the lion, the African elephant, the Cape Buffalo, the leopard and the rhinoceros.

Although technically these are the animals that are the hardest to hunt (I suppose they are more likely to trample not munch). Not that one wants to have a pack of wildebeest chasing after them but at least it seems safer as they are smaller.

Either way the point was we could get out of our car and walk around and get close to the animals without a fence between us, which was pretty cool.

We saw around 10 species of animals and I have photos of them all but will only process a few while on my trip.

We saw a group/herd/gathering of 10 giraffes. Really beautiful graceful animals.
 
 

A sable antelope – beautiful creature.

And of course lots of zebras – love love the stripes.

I can’t recall the name of these antelope but they were putting on a demonstration of head butting. It looked rather painful but they were pretty entertaining.

The Bushveld Landscape

Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

Hartbeespoort Dam

After the animals we checked out the Hartbeespoort Dam area. Beautiful also and also some nice art galleries.

The Weather

It’s winter in Africa at the moment so it’s not hot and humid. On the day we went to this game reserve they were having an unusual cold snap and it was exactly that – cold. Brrr.

But we were very fortunate because it rained much of the day but only when we were in the car. When it was time to get out and walk around it would stop raining.

So I had nice overcast skies for photography but didn’t end up getting wet. Excellent timing for us.

Right as we got home we had some beautiful hail – very very unusually for this part of Africa in winter:

Sunday

Sunday was a relaxing day with Laetitia and then a drive to Johannesburg for the start of the tour. I met up with the group Sunday evening and we are in full group tour mode. I can tell I’m going to have to get a lot of sleep as we have a full itinerary every day.

The Travel

At 5am on Wednesday, July 28th I left my home in Denver, Colorado. At 9pm on Thursday, July 29th my plane landed in Johannesburg, South Africa, a mere 32 hours later.

The flights were fairly uneventful except the 4 hours sitting on the tarmac in Washington DC due to some thunderstorms that closed the air space. I ended up on the South African airplane for a total of 21 hours without getting off; we stopped in Dakar but weren’t allowed off the plane. That is a lot of hours sitting in a dark tin can.

At least it was a big tin can with a lot of food and air conditioning and heat and I had a window seat. Although they had us keep the window shades closed so I didn’t see a heck of a lot out of that window so it was mostly handy for leaning against to sleep.

Passage through passport control was a breeze and within a minute of clearing customs, which involved doing absolutely nothing, I found the wonderful woman that offered to house and entertain me for the handful of days before the tour started.

I met Laetitia through my blog and via facebook and we didn’t exchange a lot of email so I was more than thrilled to see her after our airplane arrived 4 hours late as I had no way to notify her of the delay (when will we have internet on all flights?)

I wasn’t really sure I had a plan had she not been there but it all worked out perfectly.

Day 1

After some very delicious juice, we headed to Laetitia’s house in Pretoria. Around 11pm or midnight (which is 3-4pm Denver time) I went to bed and fell asleep within minutes. I’m not sure when I woke up again but it wasn’t until 5pm when I emerged well rested from my room. There are advantages to not checking a clock. I haven’t sleep that long in years and years.

After a interesting and educational walk around Pretoria with her husband, Rian, we returned to a lovely dinner with her entire family. very delicious and very fun.

As we had plans to get up early the next morning to visit an animal preserve it was right back to bed, which, as expected, didn’t work out so well. I slept about 1 1/2 hours and was up again at 7am to head out to the Bushveld.

The official tour starts tomorrow and I must be up early again so the Bushveld will have to wait until I write again. Although for a sneak peak you can check out a few photos on my facebook page here. (they are viewable by the public)

South Africa is amazing. This is clearly going to be a fabulous adventure and will have some amazing impact on my art, I can tell already.

For details on my art plans and south africa see here: South African Impressions. I didn’t count but with the new sales while I was traveling, I think only 1/2 of the ACEOs are remaining, or maybe it’s a bit more, but it’s close. Thank you to everyone for your support!

To Africa

I leave for South Africa this morning. After 28 hours of travel and sitting in airports I’ll be in Johannesburg. I’m bringing my pillow along on the flight.

While I’m gone my small collectible textile paintings will not be for sale via my website as I won’t be available to ship them to you.

I do have another offer for you – a new art project inspired by my trip to South African. You can reserve a piece today at big discounts.

So far quite a few people have jumped on this opportunity to reserve an African inspired ACEO ($14 now and another $14 later will buy you one of my ACEOs – normally priced at $40) and quite a few people are reserving larger pieces as with this discount they can afford a larger piece of my textile art than with my usual prices.

These prices are available until I return from Africa or sell out as quantities for each size are limited. Based on the rate of sales of the ACEOs in the first couple days I anticipate those will sell out, especially after I start posting photos on my blog during my journey.

Full details here: South African Impressions Art Project.

For those of you that already pre-reserved a piece – Thank You – your support is much appreciate.

Make Big Art

In case you missed the announcement, I’ve started a new blog/website called MakeBigArt where I post my articles targeted to other artists. The tagline is Empower Artists as I believe that knowledge is power.

I’ve been asked to mentor/coach other artists repeatedly and it is through the makebigart umbrella this activity will be organized. Although I don’t consider myself a coach, I have no formal training as a coach and I have no interest in being a coach.

What I have an interest in is sharing my knowledge as I love teaching, so I’ll be doing classes, seminars, etc, mostly around the thing I’m really good at – organizing and systems. Although there will be other topics also.

In the meantime I’m writing 1 blog post a week on makebigart and the topic for this week was multitasking and thrashing. Everyone multitasks and sometimes it gets out of hand, using the analogy from the computer world (where the term multitasking came from in the first place), this article looks at how multitasking can go bad and some ideas on how to go about it more healthy.

You can read the article here: Stop Thrashing and Start Processing.

There’s now a link in my sidebar to makebigart to make it easier for everyone to find it also.

 
Now I must jump on my last few tasks before I head to the airport. Not sure when I’ll be posting again, but it’ll be from South Africa!

The History

I’ve taken several art workshops with Nancy Crow so I’ve known about her South African arts and crafts tours for years and have always wanted to go on one. I love the colors of the African landscape (at least in photos) and I love arts and crafts, so this is pretty much the dream tour.

In the fall of 2005 I was at a workshop with Nancy and I told her I wasn’t going to do anymore workshops with her and instead I was going to save up and attend her next African adventure. I had no idea where the money was going to come from but I knew I wanted to do this.

She only does the tours every 3-5 years so I figured I had some time to save up, so I did a bit of calculating and realized that putting back money each month for the trip wouldn’t get me there anytime soon. I still dreamed about going on this trip but saved no money for it.

When I took yet another artist workshop with Nancy in 2007 (never say never) I told her again that I was going to go on the next South African tour and to let me know as soon as she started taking sign ups as the trip sells out in a week.

At that time I had $0 saved up for the vacation with no idea where the money might come from but I didn’t let that bother me, instead I just thought about how awesome it would be to go on the trip.

Making it a Reality

So along comes June of 2008 and I got an email that the sign up page for the African tour had just gone live and did I still want to go? My answer was a resounding positive YES! And, not surprisingly, because I always seem to manifest what I want, I actually had the money to go.

That same week I sold my house and as long time readers might recall, I sold my house for more than I had asked for, a lot more. More than enough to cover a month long trip to Africa. So here I am – just 2 days away from being on a plane to Africa.

Speaking of planes, I hadn’t thought much about the expense of the plane ticket and it turns out I had enough frequent flyer miles to get there for free. Pretty convenient as it turns out tickets to Africa aren’t on the cheap side.

[The story of my amazing house selling experience here: Achieving Success - it's another way cool story about things working out exactly like I wanted them to.]

My Plans

I’ve never been on a group tour before. When I went to New Zealand in 2000 it was with my family and we rented a car and did whatever we wanted on our own schedule, so this will be a new experience for me.

I had originally intended to do a bunch of planning and figure out what I could see and do in the areas where we were going and be “in the know”. I then did a huge home remodel and those plans went out the window.

I’m now on the “don’t worry about it” plan.

I only read the itinerary a few weeks ago and only because I was sitting with the nurse trying to figure out where I was going and what shots I would need. She thought that was pretty funny. I figure the right stuff will happen as it needs to.

I’m flying out a few days before the trip starts and a quilter I met online has offered for me to stay with her family, which is just about as awesome as it could be. The internet is a fabulous place.

I have bought a Dell Netbook so I will be able to send updates and stay in touch (don’t tell the folks at the day job this). I’m not sure how much internet access there will be so I’m not going to try to make plans as to how much blogging I’ll be doing. We’ll just have to wait and see.

My Art

I have no doubt this trip will have a wonderful influence on my artwork. I have a new moelskine sketch book and intend on using it and my camera often to record my adventures.

Most of my planning has been on the art project that will ensue after I return home.

I’ve outlined a new South African art project, which I unveiled in my studio newsletter earlier today. It’s a chance to prepurchase artwork from this project at a fairly significant discount by paying 1/2 up front.

An ACEO is $14 now and $14 in October(ish) when the work is complete. Several folks have already reserved their South African Impressions artwork.

You can read about the details here: South African Impressions

The Photos

I’ve been including photos in my blog post, newsletter and art project page that my dad took in 2006 in Botswana and Zambia. This trip was his final big adventure as he was diagnosed with cancer a few months after his return and passed away the following year.

I love the connection to my dad that I feel in making this journey.