Karin Daymond
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Journal

Drawings for Thinking

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Friday, 07 January 2022 13:19

drawings for thinking

 Obsessively exploring the beaches of northern KwaZulu-Natal as a child, I overlooked the limpets shells because they seemed common, rough and battered. The cowrie shells beckoned with their polished domes and gleaming teeth. I collected, categorized and even drew my prized collection.

And then, earlier this year while walking the wild Soetwater beach on the Cape Peninsula, limpet shells caught my attention. They suddenly seemed miraculous, a metaphor for coping with adversity. They are plastered to the rocks in places and patterns that seem random but are very specific, their shapes designed for the place they occupy in the inter-tidal zone. They fight territorial battles, tend their algae gardens by pruning and fertilising, and guillotine aggressors appendages by slamming their shells down on them. Kelp Limpets are shaped to fit on the stem of the Kelp and only one occupies each stem. If the Kelp holdfast breaks free in a storm, the limpet senses the change in pressure and parachutes down to the seabed to start searching for an unoccupied stem. South Africa has the highest biodiversity of limpets in the world.

 I took a bucket of (dead) limpet shells home to Mpumalanga and began working. Through drawing, I got to know these creatures intimately and they took on a sacredness, as can anything in the natural world if we pay attention. I kept drawing, moving from biological observation to a more playful space in which these wonderful shapes started to enjoy whimsical relationships and became drawings for thinking.

Night Sightings

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Tuesday, 04 January 2022 15:49

Nightsightings

We cannot see what isn’t illuminated, yet we all read different things into darkness and what we cannot see. It becomes the space where the unknown and unproven reside. Our response to what we can’t or don’t see can be most revealing, a vehicle for our dreams and our anxieties.

Living in Mpumalanga offers plenty of chances to travel on dirt roads at night. I feel soothed in remote places, where the night is darker. When I first experienced night game drives I found myself overlooking the lions and studying the way the spotlight burnt out the lit areas and increased the sense of mystery in the dark. Peering into the darkness, shining a spotlight on things connects with something primal in us.

The medium, starting with a dark plate and using a subtraction process, an accumulation of thousands of deliberate marks to coax the light coming from the light-box, was eerily akin to the idea behind these images. The single light source in the images coming from behind the viewer, challenged my knowledge of how to represent landscape, encouraging me to find new ways of seeing and drawing these lithographs.

LandsCape

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Tuesday, 04 January 2022 10:55

Journal LandsCape

LANDSCAPE art exhibition brings together three artists fascinated with the coast to explore the unique environment of the Cape of Storms.

The Cape Peninsula juts into the Atlantic Ocean like a fishhook, catching an array of unique biodiversity due to its position at the confluence of the Agulhas and Benguela ocean systems. “Fairest of Capes” or Cabo Tormentoso - the Cape of Storms - is a unique landmass which has manifested a particular mythology and diversity along its slopes. This unique location is the theme for this exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints. LANDSCAPE ruminates on the particular ecology of the peninsula through materials and experiences gathered along its shores.

The artists have found unusual common ground in their individual engagements with the land of the Cape, aptly captured by the playful duality of the exhibition title LANDS(CAPE).

"Not being there, in the western Cape, highlights the differences between here and there. Descriptions come to mind: the Lowveld of Mpumalanga where I live is like a compost heap, verdant and saturated, with tumbling vegetation and trees that have never been tortured. This environment has seeped deep into my brain and is an intrinsic part of my visual vocabulary. The landscape of the Western Cape is a new world, experienced on holiday and with colours like a sweet shop. I am working on finding my vocabulary for this place that is shaped by wind and sea. The pencil studies of limpet shells are where I started. Called Drawings for Thinking, they began at the kitchen table after long walks on the beaches south of Kommetjie. As I drew, I began to think and understand more about the interface between land and sea. Later, in my studio in landlocked Mpumalanga, the search for meaning in the patterns and forms continues. It is taking time for my eyes to adjust and for my heart to follow."
Karin Daymond 2021

 

 

Lost at Sea

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Saturday, 25 April 2020 17:40

Lost at Sea

We traveled to Sardinia, a wonderfully rugged island off the west coast of Italy. I was entranced by this wild and proud place and plan to return for a self-styled residency.
In the meantime I consoled myself by 'stealing' stones. While we were exploring the hidden recesses of this fiercely traditional island, I kept an evolving collection, editing as we travelled. The island is unforgiving terrain and seems to spit out an endless variety of rock. When we left, I had settled on a small selection which we packed in a suitcase that was supposed to go in the hold, but ended up as hand luggage. Long story.

Customs officials in Sardinia are special. They rock those epaulettes, mirrored glasses and white gloves like nowhere else. They also have some of the most sophisticated scanning that I have seen. Ping! Madame...you may not rob the island of its natural resources (fair enough). This can be a 3000 euro fine! So it was goodbye to my little collection of memories and inspiration. I think my genuine dismay at losing my beautiful stones must have softened his heart and he didn't fine me.
When we were home and unpacking the suitcases, to my joy I found these three undiscovered stones wrapped in a sock! Perhaps I will return them to their beach when I go back...

 

Lichen Portraits 2019

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Wednesday, 11 December 2019 19:16

Lichens 2019 journal

Believe it or not, there are people who have never noticed lichens. This is almost as fascinating as the lichens themselves. Lichens fly under the radar, blending into the background of life. Painting ‘portraits’ of these creatures feels like making the unseen, seen. This is essentially the work of an artist, whatever the subject.

I began painting lichens in 2017 and it has developed into an ongoing project. Wherever I go, I fall a little in love with lichens that I meet. Interestingly, they are usually a combination of fungi and bacteria, producing their own nutrients through photosynthesis. They don’t have roots and can grow in the most extreme of environments, on surfaces, ranging from granite rock to bark, from which they hang. They are simultaneously adaptable and particular. They thrive as pioneers in rapidly changing environments and are also some of the oldest creatures on earth. They are effective indicators of environmental health, particularly of air pollution.

The paintings are not intended as botanical studies, but as translations into paint, with allowances for favouritism and obsession. There is something primal about this life form. A friend said they made her think of the beginnings of life; another said that perhaps it is the fractal patterns that we find absorbing. Whatever it is, my viewers also develop personal attachments to these strange organisms, and the fact that they are obscure combinations of fungus and bacteria fades away. Perhaps it is the naming process that helps. This is the fun part. Somehow, each one has the right title and it is a matter of exploring my own mind until I find the one that fits. The successful titles are usually tongue-in-cheek with a hint of something more.

Karin Daymond
2019

 

Kalahari

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Saturday, 07 December 2019 17:06

1320 440 Kalahari
All the cliched descriptions one hears about the Kalahari are true. It is harsh land, where the distribution of the plants and the colour of the soil are the only signs that there may be, or may have been, water there.
It took me months to process what I had seen and felt. My tried and trusted methods of painting didn’t work; it was as if the light came from above and somehow, from the ground. I reassessed every colour and brush mark.

The white paper that is the start of the printmaking process suited this bleached and tentative landscape. Collaborating with Mark also worked; he is so tuned in to the surface of the print, seeing with me, the things that may go unnoticed, picking up on the tentative and helping to find a way to say it with ink. What fun it was to pick up on chance marks and develop them into thorn bushes, or pebbles and to build up layers of thousands of carefully curated dots (really like doing that!) into something that radiates heat and gives a sense of vast space.
Karin Daymond
2019

View the Kalahari lithographs here

A Sense of Place II

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Wednesday, 04 December 2019 14:39

Journal SOP Mapungubwe webA Sense of Place - Mapungubwe

Recently, I have wrapped myself in a light cocoon and been focussing on my own sense of place. Three very different landscapes feature in this exhibition of paintings and drawings.
Mapungubwe and the Kgalagadi are both trans-frontier parks, established precariously where bordering countries meet. These are extreme environments. The Kgalagadi is rugged, with an incongruent delicacy that is elusive during painting. The strong white light seems to dissolve the rocky ground and the vegetation. Painting the Kalahari challenged my familiar work processes; I struggled to make marks that were satisfyingly crisp, and eventually achieved some sense of place by building up a lattice of fine marks.

Mapungubwe seems closer to the sun than most places. Sun baked rocks punctuate the landscape, scoured by water courses that are now mostly dry. The red rocks are left to fend for themselves as the elements cause onion-skin weathering and the rocks exfoliate in layers when they heat up and cool down. Sitting in the twilight on the warm rocks anchored me to something deep under the surface of the earth.

Lichens have their own sense of place but of course it is a secretive world to which we are not always privy. They are found in almost every place on earth, but grow in specific niches, not because they want to grow there, but because nothing else can. They creep into landscapes incognito. Painting these curious creatures feels a bit like exposing them and so I call them ‘lichen portraits’ to reinstate some of their dignity. I would go as far as to say that I feel a kind of remorse in painting them and then sending them out into the world where they can’t fly under the radar any more. It’s silly, but lichens are my folly!

And then I am home, in the lush escarpment of Mpumalanga, sitting on my veranda and looking at the landscape that has been my anchor for twenty years. I know this place so intimately that I almost feel it instead of seeing it. This is dangerous territory when it comes to observational painting, because what you think you know may overwhelm what you see. Although my goal was not photographic realism, I wanted each of the twelve paintings (one for each month of the year) to be true to that exact place and the season. This was an interesting process because the location of my veranda stays constant, and yet each painting evokes a different feeling; intense observation coming full circle in the distillation of the marks and colours into something specific, yet familiar. Playfully, and with great joy, working on this exhibition has resulted in my current mantra: the more specific a landscape painting, the more universal the interpretation and meaning.

 

A Sense of Place

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Wednesday, 04 December 2019 14:28

A Sense of Place Home webA Sense of Place - home

Recently, I have wrapped myself in a light cocoon and been focussing on my own sense of place. Three very different landscapes feature in this exhibition of paintings and drawings.
Mapungubwe and the Kgalagadi are both trans-frontier parks, established precariously where bordering countries meet. These are extreme environments. The Kgalagadi is rugged, with an incongruent delicacy that is elusive during painting. The strong white light seems to dissolve the rocky ground and the vegetation. Painting the Kalahari challenged my familiar work processes; I struggled to make marks that were satisfyingly crisp, and eventually achieved some sense of place by building up a lattice of fine marks.

Mapungubwe seems closer to the sun than most places. Sun baked rocks punctuate the landscape, scoured by water courses that are now mostly dry. The red rocks are left to fend for themselves as the elements cause onion-skin weathering and the rocks exfoliate in layers when they heat up and cool down. Sitting in the twilight on the warm rocks anchored me to something deep under the surface of the earth.

Lichens have their own sense of place but of course it is a secretive world to which we are not always privy. They are found in almost every place on earth, but grow in specific niches, not because they want to grow there, but because nothing else can. They creep into landscapes incognito. Painting these curious creatures feels a bit like exposing them and so I call them ‘lichen portraits’ to reinstate some of their dignity. I would go as far as to say that I feel a kind of remorse in painting them and then sending them out into the world where they can’t fly under the radar any more. It’s silly, but lichens are my folly!

And then I am home, in the lush escarpment of Mpumalanga, sitting on my veranda and looking at the landscape that has been my anchor for twenty years. I know this place so intimately that I almost feel it instead of seeing it. This is dangerous territory when it comes to observational painting, because what you think you know may overwhelm what you see. Although my goal was not photographic realism, I wanted each of the twelve paintings (one for each month of the year) to be true to that exact place and the season. This was an interesting process because the location of my veranda stays constant, and yet each painting evokes a different feeling; intense observation coming full circle in the distillation of the marks and colours into something specific, yet familiar. Playfully, and with great joy, working on this exhibition has resulted in my current mantra: the more specific a landscape painting, the more universal the interpretation and meaning.

 

Scatterlings

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Monday, 02 December 2019 17:33

Scatterlings II oil on canvas 130 x 160cm

The seed of the Scatterlings paintings grew from a conversation with a Zimbabwean man, Leslie. He spoke in vivid detail about his experiences as a migrant worker, and his relationship with home. He has been home annually for ten years, yet the phrase he kept using was “I have a home”.

Leslie’s references to home were concrete and practical. He spoke of drought and exchange rates, school shoes and roads. In 2010, when life on a subsistence farm became unsustainable, he went into the forest and harvested Mukwa trees (known in South Africa as Kiaat) and made bowls from the wood. He travelled to Cape Town to try to sell them, but his passport and the bowls were stolen. To make the paintings, I needed a vehicle for this idea, something that took the concept beyond border posts and identity documents. The flying seeds are about transcending borders, whatever they may be.

Pterocarpus Angolensis, the distinctive tree that produces these entrancing “wing fruit” (from the Latin) is native to Southern Africa. It is under threat because the prized hardwood is durable, easy to polish and resistant to termites. Interestingly, it is used to make the Mbira because it produces a rich, resonant sound.
Scatterlings I has a warm sky, dry seeds and a sliver of distant forest. In Scatterlings II, the seeds are green and there is the promise of rain, a different season and a different feeling but with the same sense of these beings floating in vast space. They move with the wind and are weightless, yet solid. Deliberately, the paintings do not have a single focus because I want the viewer to consider each seed individually, even though in ‘real’ life they are identical.

Karin Daymond
2019

 

 

Yes, my Mom is an artist

Category: Journal
Karin Daymond
Created: Tuesday, 27 February 2018 10:27

my mom the artist

Notes from my delightfully sarcastic offspring, on growing up with an artist mother…

  • Complementary colours were old hat before I was five
  • One eye squint and fingers measuring the view means it’s going to be a long trip
  • Seeing distant smoke and driving towards it to study the veld fire
  • Artwork taking seating precedence in the car
  • Not knowing what to say when asked “are you an artist like your mother?”
  • My first playdate and I come home to report that it was fun, but I don’t know where their studio is
  • Fighting my way down the passage through a forest of paintings
  • What do you mean I can’t doodle in class?
  • Aprons behind the kitchen door, more paint than food on them
  • Strange music
  • Can I eat this, or is Mom painting it?
  • “All fruit looks like vaginas”
  • Please go fetch the cerulean blue plate
  • Knowing no one in your family will ever play rugby
  • Suddenly, during play season, she’s the most popular mother at school, makes up for her absences when she paints the backdrop
  • Squinting at me like I’m a painting
  • Is that painting of me; am I sleeping or dead?
  • Gallery finger food, Saturday lunch
  • No Prestik, but kneadable erasers work too
  • Living in a house that’s purple, but only we can tell that it’s not brown
  • Never any HB pencils, only 8B or 2H
  • Graceful, last-minute and relentlessly aesthetic approach to everything, including science projects
  • Home time and she is photographing the lichens on the trees in the school parking

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