TSoT: Kalahari Popcorn F – Brittle

TSoT = The Story of Trees

A friend of mine often tells me that she feels like a sloth, because she did not do what she had set out to do. Today I feel that word may apply to me. However, I do not want to print a t-shirt with it on it, but the truth of the matter is that it has been more than a year ago that I wrote a blog post.

In the meantime, I have been paying the website fees (in vain?) and when I look at all the fingers of the facts pointing directly at me, for too long, I may just start eating sweets and go to my bed and sleep to forget my reality. Life happens and our attention is needed elsewhere. I enjoy writing, but, like so many other things, it can become a pill I will have to sugar from time to time it seems. What is it that you put off? (Help me not to feel too lonely in my own self-assessment.) Let me stop all the “meta”-business and continue where I stopped a year ago.

I decided to use the word brittle as the title. The two other options were: hard toffee and candy. I looked for an English version of the Afrikaans word tameletjie. The older folks would typically have made brittle (or tameletjie) by melting butter, sugar and water on the stove; if you were not very careful, the sugar would burn very easily and then those costly ingredients are wasted. Once you have successfully made your brittle it would harden and then you could break it with a small hammer into smaller “shards” or bite-size pieces. Brittle is something you would eat slowly, and it is definitely a treat you need time for.

However, those were the days … Nowadays when you walk into a supermarket you have so many choices when it comes to sweets or candy, but it still remains a delight to eat the fruit of you own labour. Do you still make any kind of candy or sweets yourself? If you enjoy trying things yourself, you may want to have a look at this site: Delight in the taste of South Africa: Discover the tameletjie recipe - FinGlobal. If you enjoy historical context too, you most definitely need to open the link.

It seems as if making your own candy can be a wonderful and spectacular business venture too. When I taught art in Saudi Arabia, I ventured down one wing of the Red Sea Mall in Jeddah, and there was a spectacular candy store behind glass, and you could watch the “candy chefs” making the prettiest sweets from scratch. It was actually unbelievable to see the final result, which you could then buy per kilogram.

I wonder what the dentists would say about these small supermarket candy factories. Why is it that what is beautiful and sweet must (always) be harmful too? The Afrikaans word, tameletjie, carries with it that predicament element, because if you say something is a tameletjie, it implies that there are more serious matters at the root or that something is amiss or that there is a problem that will require diplomatic intervention. Let me not get carried away, I must be old enough by now to know that every issue usually invites multiple perspectives and each person has the privilege to either bite into the matter or to say, “I will pass, thank you”.

Brittle. Pen and ink, watercolour and acrylic inks.

Here you can see the work that inspired these thoughts of mine. If you look through your eyelashes at this miniature work of mine, it is actually a rather odd composition and it reminds me of the bold wallpaper patterns of the 70s. There are two distinct halves on the left (and foreground), namely the brown and beige bushes and the curvy shape of the clouds announced by the rows of mauve dots, while the tree trunk protruding from the mottled foreground bushes, grabs the clouds and unites the design.

The use of muted colour allowed me to get away with this simple composition fairly effectively (I hope), but bold colours would have pulled this simple composition apart. As an artist, I prefer using bold strong colours, but occasionally using a muted palette, is like eating brittle, you do it slowly and you enjoy the experience.

I think I can easily ramble on, but perhaps it is time to say goodbye? Remember there is Art in your heArt. May you enjoy sweet moments today that do not require an intervention of a diplomatic nature.