"Contemplation"

Some paintings are made from memory. This one was made inside a memory. Painted in a caravan on a quiet farm outside Pretoria — my grandmother and uncle's farm — during the months I had returned to South Africa after emigrating to New Zealand with my family.

Emigration is a strange kind of grief. You are between two homes, belonging fully to neither. I was finding it difficult, and I retreated to the veld, to that caravan, to paint.

The dynamic here is a conversation across time. In the foreground, in sharp, earthly detail, is the elder — lined skin, glasses low on her nose, head covered, gaze fixed on something beyond the canvas. She is the Crone, the grandmother, the root, the South African soil itself. She holds the landscape in her hands — a waterfall tumbling over rocks, a memory of the land.

And behind her, like a breath on a window, like a question that won't leave, floats a younger woman — pale, pink-lit, elf-eared, eyes downcast. She is me then. The younger self, the emigrant, the dreamer, translucent and uncertain, reaching out but not quite touching.

They look in the same direction but do not look at each other. One is solid, one is a ghost. One knows how to stay, one is still learning how to leave.

Washed in melancholic shades of lavender, violet and faded gold, this painting captures that in-between place — the quiet, heavy, holy contemplation of wondering where you belong.