Description
Farmer
By Marc Alexander from his ‘Touch’ exhibition. ‘Farmer’, Pencil on 300g Archival Paper, 10cm by 14cm, (2013).
Farmer
This artwork brings back fond memories of my Grand Father. My grandparents were the caretakers of a relative’s farm. It was not a very big farm that lay at the foot of a high mountain in a town called ‘Goerge’. George is the second-largest city in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The town is a popular holiday destination and the commercial hub and capital city of the Garden Route. I lived there for a few months when I was a young boy. I remember my grandparents were not afraid to get their hands dirty with hard work. There was a fruit tree orchid on the farm, and whenever it had not rained for a month or so, these trees were watered by carrying buckets of water to each tree, a seemingly endless job. There were also many farm animals to take care of. My grandparents would wake before sunrise and start their daily routine. I miss them terribly.
Touch Series
After a long season of producing portraits in oils, I returned for a while to the humble pencil. The ‘Touch’ exhibition, which opened at the Studio Gallery Kalk Bay on Friday June 14th 2013 and ran until July 3rd, was the result of that experience – a true celebration of the beauty and expressiveness of the human hand.
Several months before this show, a group of us artists got together in the studio to work on life drawings, and for me, hands are one of the most difficult parts of the human body to draw, so I decided to master this challenge by producing one hundred detailed drawings. Friends, family and even casual acquaintances, modeled their hands for me and in each drawing I tried to capture the unique character of each individual.
A great deal could be learned about a person just by observing their hands. For example, the slight hand gestures of a person in love, or the anxious mannerisms of the addicted smoker clutching his last cigarette, or the telltale scars and callouses which belong to a hard working laborer. The hands are young and old, lined and smooth and endlessly expressive and tell a hundred stories which are all captured in my hyper-realistic style.
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