Kalahari Rain Pods - Nicolaas Maritz

KALAHARI RAIN PODS NICOLAAS MARITZ

KKAALL AA HH AARRI I R RAAII NN PP OODDS S An album of digital drawings An album of digital drawings celebrating the magical Kalahari rain NICOLAAS MARITZ

NICOLAAS MARITZ Nemesia*Press_online Nemesia*Press_online DARLING D A 2018 RLING

2018

CONTENTS Introduction Rain Pods & Landscapes Biography Website

INTRODUCTION Watching the skies. Waiting for the rain. This is a constant daily activity in the Kalahari during the summer. The season can be cruel. Withered veld on bare red sand, and no sign of rain. It can easily drive people to drink. The waiting is enervating. What are people even doing in this region at all, let alone farming. Prayers are highly rated.

One day hearing thunder from afar; seeing dark clouds and a fabulous display of lightning on the horizon; even smelling the rain, but disappointment day after day.

The fickle rain has moved on. It’s raining somewhere else. Our prayers have been too weak. Sleepless nights to the sound of a mosquito choir. Bleak mornings; hot already. How wilted are the gardens. The praying mantis keeps to the deepest shadows.

Waking up with the sound of soft rain on the tin roof. Nothing as soothing. What matter if it leaks all over the house, the rain has come. In the morning everyone will be smiling. All the animals will have a spring in their step. The humans will follow suit.

Getting caught in a real old fashioned thunderstorm. Pelting rain; lightning all around. Sometimes extremely frightening, but so cathartic. Thorn trees creak and groan. Dogs are nervous and hide under the beds. Cats, like the humans, pretending not to be nervy; holding a pose. Too soon this will be over. Meanwhile there will be pancakes with cinnamon sugar; rain cuisine.

A fat purple rain cloud is like a huge purple seed pod. It bursts open with lifegiving rain. It signals clearly to the seedpods in the sand by falling on them directly. The rain is a language of seed pods. It is a language so mysterious and ancient that we can all understand it; it needs no translation. We know.

A funeral in the rain. Uncomfortable and tedious. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, almost like a human sacrifice interred. Prayers for the dead, and prayers for more rain to come. Everyone goes home. The waiting starts again.

Nothing has changed. The sand also waits; the patient red sand of the Kalahari, and the seeds lie still and silent.

Nicolaas Maritz Darling May 2018

BIOGRAPHY Nicolaas Maritz (born 9 July 1959) is a South African multi-media artist.

His artistic roots are deeply embedded in the Southern African landscape.

Drawing inspiration from its shapes and colours, its creatures and its sounds, he has, during his long career, created a unique body of work, instantly recognizable by virtue of the idiosyncrasy of his vision and the immediacy of the manner in which it is realized. Curious juxtapositions – of the real and the fantastical, the natural and the artificial, the simple and the complex, the humorous and the sinister – are a defining characteristic of Maritz’s art. Many writers have commented on this aspect of his work, and on the creative friction generated by this interplay of contradictory elements, which extends also to his stylistic usage and artistic aims. In describing his paintings, Hilary Prendini-Toffoli writes, “though deceptively naive, in a retro technique evocative of the ‘30s and ‘40s, these multilevelled paintings manage at the same time to be both meaningful and decorative.”

Maritz was born into an artistic Pretoria family, his father an architect and his mother a ceramic artist. Early influences which were to inform his work,

were derived from his parents, his Namibian grandmother, and

two artistic Pretoria aunts. Their architectural designs and drawings, watercolours, graphic work, ceramics and illustrations inspired the young Maritz, and helped to form his precocious artistic sensibility, long before he reached art school at the University of Cape Town in 1978.

Maritz is a prolific artist, but seems to possess an almost boundless ability to reinvent his aesthetic approach. He is particularly known for his paintings of the Southern African landscape, especially for his singular portrayals of Table Mountain, but his extensive oeuvre is by no means limited to this genre. It includes a large body of paintings, as well as drawings and prints, with excursions into graphic design, ceramics, sculpture, digital and other media. In recent years his approach has been to re-cycle some of his past works in ‘traditional‘ media, through digital collage and montage techniques, to create contemporary and cryptic fusion forms, featuring digital drawing and manipulation, layered sound, and video.

https://sites.google.com/site/nicolaasmaritzgallery/