If I am grumpy, need to charge my emotional battery, or just feel like celebrating life on the Garden Route, I take to the beach and walk as far as I can and imagine I am Forrest Gump, that the trek will last forever and I never need to come home.
“You have to do the best with what God gave you,” was one of Gump’s best-known lines and it resonates with me.
The beaches we have here are the best, they are a God-given blessing to those of us who live here.
There’s one particular seashore that lends itself to a 10km walk and that’s Brenton-on-Sea to Buffalo Bay or the other way round if you feel like it.
It must be done at low-tide because 13,000 steps on soft sand is hard going.
There are, of course, other hikes such as the Robberg Peninsula, but you can’t beat the Buff’s walk if you want to zone out.
There is no rock-scrambling required and, most importantly, you don’t have to concentrate on where your feet go because puff adders don’t like the beach.
Sometimes I walk with a friend, but more often than not I walk alone because I like this solitude and listening to music.
I am always blown away by how deserted this route is. You can walk for kilometres and some days not come across a soul.
The other advantage is that it is perfectly safe even on your own and you can forget about having to watch shadows.
Other urban walks, even those along the estuary, are not so safe any more.
I had an incident last year where I was almost mugged for the chain around my neck and so now, unless I am walking on a beach, I carry no valuables, not even a phone, so sadly there goes my Spotify album.
This particular Saturday, I had checked the tides in advance and was looking forward to just taking off, but first I was going to the opening of an art exhibition at Knysna Fine Art (May 3).
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined how this exhibit would impact my walk that day and all beach visits in future.
I would go as far as to say that the new solo exhibition of South African master landscape painter Walter Voigt was a seminal experience.
I don’t mean to sound disparaging here, but there are lots of aspirant seascape painters to be found in coastal towns who obviously find inspiration from the ocean, but to capture this miracle adequately requires nothing short of genius otherwise the result is as kitsch as seashell ornaments in a home or seahorse stickers on glass doors and scatter cushions.
After I wrote this, I noticed for the first time we have a seahorse on a mirror and blow me down two on the shower doors, ugh!
Voigt has just released a series of oil on canvas paintings focusing on seascapes, a shift from the breathtaking landscapes, cityscapes and dramatic cloudscapes he is famous for.
The solo exhibition, called Changing Tides, is on for the rest of the month of May — so don’t miss it.
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It is a paradigm shift from what he normally paints. Instead of capturing the bushveld, that magical dry smell and feel of the African bush, he has chosen seascapes in this current body of paintings.
Voigt says these new paintings in the Changing Tides exhibition portray the sea in all its moods, sometimes benign and serene, at other times dangerous with great swells, merciless currents and crashing breakers.
The water changes colour constantly; the waves are either peaceful or powerful; currents merge and part, flow and shift, and the sea is in a constant state of flux.
This phenomenon is one that only a very talented and accomplished artist could hope to capture.
Voigt moved to Plettenberg Bay 2½ years ago from the bushveld and was inspired by his new surrounds.
For the purpose of this exhibition, Voigt has produced 11 seascapes and they also differ from his usual landscapes because white and blue colours dominate.
There is water, wind and spray, immense power and energy in all of them, he says, and this is quite true.
Painting water requires great skill, Voigt says.
“The Impressionists, such as Monet and Sisley, recognised that while water is colourless, it reflects every colour imaginable, and that can include the purest of pure white and the deepest of deep blue,” he said.
Anybody who knows about South African art will be familiar with Voigt’s parents, both accomplished artists in their own right.
Voigt was born in Johannesburg in 1971 and when he was four years old, the family moved to a nature conservancy in the mountainous Lowveld escarpment.
He went to school in White River and then Pretoria, and in 1992, he completed a three-year course in graphic design, majoring in illustration, at the Witwatersrand Technikon in Johannesburg.
“Becoming an artist came naturally to me because of my parents’ influence. I started drawing as a child and then studied graphic design, but found my place in painting,” he said.
Of his move to the Garden Route and the sea, he said: “One cannot help but be absorbed by the ocean’s energy and the light that falls on a particular part of a wave, a rock or patch of sand.
“This would inspire any landscape painter to want to paint it.”
For those of us who are familiar with Plett beaches, you might recognise a favourite spot Voigt has captured such as Robberg Shoreline with Oystercatcher, which is a 100cm x 200cm masterpiece, the largest in this collection.
In this piece, the spray is silver as it flies off the waves, the rocks are solid, permanent and very present, and the bird so determined as it swoops.
This painting is gorgeous. It is untamed and restless, but also mysterious enough that one could never get tired of looking at it.
The other seascapes with names such as Wave Crash and Waveblast are all equally breathtaking ... I know I am waxing lyrical, but these paintings simply need to be seen.
The Everard Read Galleries in SA and London have given Voigt “wind under his wings and great support”, he says.
He has had 14 solo exhibitions in SA and two in London. His work has found homes in Australia, California and Europe.
Voigt describes himself as a man of the sky and the earth, of water and air.
He hikes, cycles, paraglides, scuba dives and takes to his motorbike to experience the natural elements.
“All these activities give me a perspective, a three-dimensional look at the ground, the clouds, the sea and the rich bounty of the natural world around me and therefore the elements I paint,” he said.
Not only are my beach walks going to be with new eyes, but I find myself at a pizza joint in Knysna which is as close to the sea as one gets and I am mesmerised by the colours of the water, the silver spray, the way waves curl in and create a fringe of lace, how splendid the rocks are and how orange the beak of that Oystercatcher really is.
The Herald
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