A recent barefoot hike with friends through the lush indigenous forest of Everton Conservancy, in Durban’s Upper Highway area, offered up, just as I had hoped, the topic for this month’s article.
After recent rainfall, the earth underfoot was cool and energizing, although slippery in places, as our path took us alongside the equally refreshing Molweni River (stream really), which we splashed in and out of occasionally along the way. The densely enveloping vegetation and canopy above ensured that the sunlight reaching down to us was dappled at best. All around us, the abundant birdlife fluttered and sang, occasionally drowned out by the strident zing of cicadas.
To the left and right of us, straddling rotting logs and mossy tree trunks, we encountered more than twenty species of fungi, including mushrooms of all colours, sizes and descriptions. At one point along the way, I spotted a large daddy-long-legs spider, inky-black yet with a hint of iridescent blue — a broader inspection, however, revealed a multitude of these spiders all around, which, I’ll admit, did send a horror-movie chill down my spine.
Reaching the vaulted environs of the waterfall and its surrounding cliffs, amidst fine spray propelled outwards by the cascading water, we were greeted with a sense of majesty by simply being present in this place. As we stood there in the pool at the base of the falls, squishing our feet through the sand into the underlying mud, a lapis-coloured dragonfly settled on a nearby dry patch, accompanying us in our reverie for some time.
In the surrounding forest, there was much decay, offset, or beautified, as our minds would have it, by the bright sparkle of dewdrops refracting a myriad of sunlit rainbows and the splash of greens, yellows and blues against dull browns and ochres. What I found so enchanting was the haphazard manner in which mushrooms chose to populate a fallen bough, not necessarily facing the light but away from it; or how the spider spun its intricate web stretched across an impossible expanse — all a ridiculous sublimity, a divine equilibrium.
As we were chatting along the path about our surroundings and the way it enveloped our senses, one of my friends said, “Beauty lies in the imperfections…” and it struck me that there exists a duality in nature that has a great deal to teach us about the very same differentiation in art. And yet nature is art, and art is nature, isn’t it?
For millennia, artists have been captivated by the imperfections of nature, the contrast in form and spatiality; in discordant colours, the way higgledy-piggledy shapes marry together perfectly. It’s the non-sameness of things that I believe attract us artists most, urging us to describe these phenomena in whatever medium, discipline, or expression that calls us forth.
This same flawed perfection is then transposed to our artwork via our unique interpretation; with brush strokes, scratches, and sculptings — through realism or abstract, or a blend of the two, we offer our own blemished ideal of this duality. And so, our work is perceived with the same element of wonder that nature instils in all of us artists to begin with. We should cherish every mark we make, just as we do the birdsong, the beautiful colours and textures of nature, the inspirational vibrations of Mother Earth, as the very DNA of art itself lies therein.
Whenever we view an artwork, whether it’s our own or someone else’s, let’s seek out those imperfections, for it is within them that the hours of learning and experience show up as the beauty of the heart and soul that created them.
Guy McGowan
WASA representative in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal
Chairperson of North Coast Artists, KwaZulu-Natal.