The Luck of the Draw

Its a long time since I have done a dot to dot puzzle. I was always rather fond of them and used them to teach my children how to count. They are such a good marriage of right and left brain, aren't they? A combination of numbers and art as the picture magically appears.

Art and Maths are the opposite ends of the scale and passion of my sons schooling - one being hated and one being loved. It was in the pursuit of the one that I took him and a fellow art student to visit a local artist the other day.
Here in the Garden Route are many dabblers in Art and a few famous names also, hidden as they mostly are amongst the mountains and dunes.

Beatrix Bosch lives on the ridge of the dunes of Wilderness and has had an open house for the month of April - an exhibition contained within her house - and so we popped in. We were on our way to George for Art classes and she was alone when we visited, and we spent longer than we intended and were late (although, of cause we did not miss anything really). We stayed longer because we were invited upstairs to her workroom - which we could not resist and lingered longer there, fingering her piles of skins and admiring her newest work in process.

I glimpsed her bedroom to one side and heard the radio for a moment before she clicked it off. I had willingly toured all the huge art works downstairs, and talked about them, felt them, smelt them - praised them.

But, I have to confess my eyes kept wandering to the huge panoramic views of the crashing sea and beach stretching the entire length of the house, visible through the wall of windows. I noted that her bed was placed so that she could see it - the crashing sea.
 I enjoyed the twinkle in her aging eye. The sadness too, was there, because of longing and missing and getting old and things ending, I think. I imagined the legendary parties  (she said with up to two hundred guests) that used to fill the place in the seventies...
I saw one photo of her in the sixties, so pretty and vital. I remember her comment of how her and her late beloved husband used to run down the wooden walkway to the beach, with bicycles, and haul up amazing and twisted lumps of drift wood, which he made up into sculptures..

It was she who interested me , almost more than her creations of leather (purple, red, orange, turquoise, black) and wool, hanging heavy on every wall. I thought of her strength in bone and muscle and mind as she created, letting the leather speak to her,  against that backdrop of sea and sand.

So I left late, but still sad not to stay longer. She seemed lonely, and would not deny it, because she is quite recently widowed and alone. After all, there is surely no way to separate the Creator from her Creation. The Artist from her Art.

In preparation for teaching Art I am lately swept away into the world of Artists. Enthralled by the stories of Gauguin, Modigliani, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Picasso and the rest. I think of Paris and poverty, of mistresses and madness, paint and passion, light and laughter.
The Creator and Creation, all jumbled up and impossible to separate.
Dots and numbers, dots and numbers..

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about the act of creation and how it starts with one dot.
 One number, or a lot of dots and how they are joined and become the numbers, the sequence, the picture...
And I think about Beatrix - on her duney hilltop, within her walls of bright and brilliant leather - looking out at the sea with her artists eye.