My most recently completed watercolor map, Headland, is my latest on the theme of urban-nature contrasts. This one is inspired by Lion’s Head, a dramatic granite outcrop and surrounding park in the middle of Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a small piece of Table Mountain National Park, disconnected from the rest (although Table Mountain itself, with its popular cable car to the top, is only a short drive away).
Lion’s Head with the surrounding city (and Table Mountain in the lower left), summit trail, and main road from downtown. The trail takes about a half day to hike up and down.
The National Park overall protects an island of fynbos, a shrubland/grassland ecosystem typical of South Africa’s zone of Mediterranean climate. It represents a Biodiversity Hotspot, globally rare and unique not only because little of its natural extents remain but also because those extents have always been relatively limited: it makes up the Cape Floristic Province, by far the world’s smallest such region (there are only six in total). This environment is also visually stunning, especially thanks to its many species of Protea.
Fynbos shrubland with Lion’s Head beyond.
Table Mountain itself, south of the city, with a large protea in the foreground.
Another side of Lion’s Head.
The Silvermine area of the National Park, farther south.
On top of my usual motivation to capture empoweringly “compressed” experiences of the natural world, my goal in Headland was to emphasize a feeling of this sensitive landscape’s specialness and fragility, both in terms of this particular tiny piece of it and more metaphorically the ecosystem as a whole. That meant conveying the proximity of the surrounding city at the same time as the feeling of being a world away from it—the park’s simultaneous qualities of urban-ness and wildness.
Below the landform, on the northwest side.
View northeast toward downtown and along a linear extension of the park.
Circling the base of the summit, looking south toward Table Mountain.
View south from the summit.
Headland, watercolor on paper, 24”x36.”
The watercolor overlaid with the circulation; the trail is screened back where it’s hidden by the foreground.
In my last few posts I’ve introduced the idea that while my aim with the faceting of these compositions—the sharpening of environmental edges on paper—has been to express my urge to freeze these edges in place in the real world, that same pattern of edges injects a feeling of movement. I think of that dynamism as signifying ecological flow and change, from a combination of human activity and nature’s own processes, that’s ever-present and “natural” itself despite my wishing that it weren’t.
In this particular work, to me that sense of flow and interconnectivity in the form of human-environment interactions represents something more intangible than physical. It isn’t human impacts on the ecosystem—though there are plenty of them, including but far from limited to the effects of visitation (not to mention the existence of the city in the first place). Instead, it’s the fundamental human-ness of the landscape as a psychological image of (at least superficially) “pristine” nature, distinct and distant from urban life but at the same time central to the city’s identity. The radial arrangement that the facets happened to take, driven by the spiral form of the trail, seems to me to create the impression of the park as a spinning vortex, center of gravity, or beating heart.
This mental image of pristine-ness, isolation, and stability is essentially the one I’m trying to create (or impose) in the first place through the collaging/faceting. That same pattern of edges, though, simultaneously creates a sensation of dynamism, flow, and interconnectivity that you could say represents one particular example of human-environment inseparability: the artificiality, human-ness, or “image-ness,” of that idea of pristine nature. Put another way, it’s the fact (or “frame”) of the image versus its content.
I’ll have a lot more to say on this later, but I don’t think of this juxtaposition of “imagination” (the content) and “reality” (the fact or frame) as a tension or contradiction; it’s more of a coexistence, or a layering. They’re both “realities,” just different kinds.
Darren
The park imagined as “wild” and “natural,” distinct from the city and humanity…
…but that image itself is a human/psychological construction, in a sense infiltrating inward from the city.(You might’ve noticed similar diagrams and terminology in my previous post; in that case the arrow direction is reversed, with “nature” infiltrating humanity.)