MAEDER OSLER / This constitutes the launch of our TOVER ARTS series in which we introduce works by artists –- young, old, well-known and obscure – which explore rural areas and subjects. We start with a painting by Dilys Kneebone, a special friend and neighbour in a retirement village in Somerset-West. It’s a rural scene on a farm in the rugged Sterkstroom area in the Eastern Cape, where Dilys grew up. Intriguingly, it’s not a painting of the actual farmhouse as she saw it then, but as she imagined it to be a 150 years or so before.
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IN MY BOOK, art — in its widest sense — is a valid, instructive and sustainable way of looking at things, and artworks also serve as models for analysing the realities of life, living, feeling and perception. Art can be as real and as important as those imaginary childhood friends whom young children have and speak to unseen, and reminds us of the perpetual child in us, that fresh perception of youth which we struggle to retain, which really leads back to unsullied Nature.
When I was teaching at Umso Senior Secondary School in Colesberg in the early 2000s, I had a go with young second language learners at the poem ‘The Cool Web’ by the first world war poet Robert Graves, which opens by stating ‘Children are dumb to know how hot the day is…’, and then follows with ‘how hot is the scent of the summer rose’.
I referred to it again only two years ago when my eldest son, Mark, who carried his inner artist with him to his daily work on building sites – suddenly died of a heart attack. So poems as works of art also have a special meaning for me, and I would like to think for my deceased son; and for most of us human beings lucky enough to be still alive and kicking.
This rumination is about all of that, but especially about ART, which my invisible childhood companion and I agree is about living and all arts; painting, sculpture, music, theatre and opera, writing, and all other forms of expression by people with skill and imagination. The arts are a special definition of what it means to be a human being – an idea you can explore further at your leisure when you have – or create — the time.
Art, even like voting – or even deliberate non-voting – is an expression of individual and communal skill, craft and imagination which can be unleashed anywhere, at any time. As one grows up and ages, invisible childhood companions can become visible and become special friends as well, also to share explorations of skills, crafts and imaginations. Often, as one grows up, they seem to become more real and far more varied; that’s not always a good thing, but mostly it’s beyond nightmares, and offer enriching friendships.
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Because of the ubuntu in us and in our natures, we also have some special friends. One such friend I like to think I have is Dilys Kneebone, a neighbour in a haven we find ourselves in, a space for retired people, many of whom are determined not to retire, or unable to really retire.
Yes, her surname really is Kneebone – it’s Cornish, she says — and she jokes about it as well. Rather like my surname, which doesn’t really refer to rugby players, nor to oysters, but ‘ostlers’, those guys who held the reins of horses while their smarter, more classy riders swept into the hostelries to eat, drink, smoke, rest and make merry or make trouble. While we ‘Ostlers’ were left to hold the reins, the Kneebones and others were free to more imaginative things : and all of us were watching from our respective different places and graces.
Our featured artist, Dilys Kneebone.
Which reminds me, I’ve been trying for some time to persuade my brother in law, Charles van der Merwe, an accountant turned artist – notably a painter around the rural Kleinmond mountains and seasides – to send us some of his artwork for placement on Toverview in the hope that others, especially from rural areas, would follow. It’s still unclear whether Charles will come to the party, or forever stay awol. So this is a cheeky reminder that there is so much unfinished business out there …
Thank goodness, then, that Dilys is close at hand to lead the way with this painting. She painted it for her children many years ago, who by then were living oceans and continents away, where they had found work – rather like the original Kneebones and Oslers in search of new livelihoods in the colonies in the early nineteenth century. I first saw it just the other day when she was threatening to throw it away, in one of her great energetic clear-out moods, when it’s actually best not to visit.
But I did anyway, so I was able to say: ‘Noooo! Please don’t throw it away! It’s more valuable than you think …’
I would dearly love to use Dilys’s example to try to entice other artists to come forward. I imagine she would protest, saying it isn’t art. But I would like to insist that it is, at the least a sign or product of artistic endeavour, which could inspire others to come out of their various shynesses, circumstances and cupboards, especially about ‘rural spaces and what are also material things’.
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When I look at the painting, I see four trees, one of which looks like what I call a ‘Karoo drought tree’, one wobbly fenceline, and two grazing animals (sheep and/or cattle, or one of each – or maybe even a Gnu or two?)
I am moved by a sense of distance, created by a nearby hillside and mountains far away. There is an entry road, which speaks of highways and byways. A cosy-looking house, with a red or brown roof – a steep roof, to lift the spirits. And a loft window, to guard others?
Two chimneys, to guard against the cold. A full-length stoep, for having tea, coffee and biskuit, or watch the sunset. What seems like a water tank and some shrubs at the front. And a curious structure near a tree. …
I have many questions to ask Dilys, including the classic, journo-type questions which the retired teacher part of me also like to ask and learn from: What?, Who? Where? When? How? And then the deeper ‘Why?’ And then the big question I always like to ask myself: ‘So What?’
In part response, she explains that she took a photograph of the painting and sent it to her two boys, Philip and Jonathon, in England, to show them what the farm looked like where she grew up. ‘They were never there …’
Philip, her younger son, wrote back (from his high-powered office in the City of London): ‘It’s sweet, almost whimsical, being from part imagination and in soft translucent water colours, but also to me, a very South African scene and of the story of farming there, but connected to you …’
Dilys explains further: ‘My father built all the dams and troughs with bricks he fired on the farm, plus all the rondavels for an office and his mother and all the brooder houses with central lamps for thousands of newly hatched chicks. One of his mother’s incubators took 8 000 eggs at a time. Also all the servants’ houses …’
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Later, I asked her to look at a draft of this article, and she responded as follows:
‘The farm had a corrugated iron blockhouse with a raised floor and “windows” to slide open for the rifles which the British used. Colonel Bailie, a family member, was four or five years old when Jannie Smuts came down from the railway line to look for horses. But a mist covered the buildings, so he missed the stables and the horses.
Lieutenant-Colonel LAHR Bailie escaped from Tobruk with Captain Toys Norton and spent something like 28 days to reach a NZ group. Toys got the VC. My father was good at maths, and worked out all the gun readings for the gunners, 22-pounders … Cheers — going to the hospital now to see about Lynn …’ [a friend]
Thanks for sharing, the painting as well as the reminiscences …
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I am again reminded of Zadie Smith’s article titled ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction’ (2019):
‘…Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion…’
In similar vein, this supposedly amateur painting has unlocked memories and questions, and a good deal of energetic stoep talk. That is what I have long thought a project like Toverview can help with, especially around arts in rural areas, and art about rural areas and rural times. And, for that matter, all forms of art, and all forms of craft , and all forms of skills… ?
Also, we hope, for all the aspirant Tover artists out there, especially in the rural areas, and especially in the Karoo .…We, who, I like to think, are all in a ‘cool web’ of art, at least?