DIGITAL GARDENING An album of digital images for a video.
NICOLAAS MARITZ
Nemesia*Press_online DARLING 2018
INTRODUCTION Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. Claude Monet A garden should be rather small, or else you’ll have no fun at all. - Anon.
The area where I live, namely the village of Darling, about an hour from Cape Town, up the South African West Coast, is, like large parts of the rest of the country, suffering from a prolonged drought. We get most of our rain in the winter, so the summers are extremely dry anyway, with a very strong south easterly wind drying things out even more. Severe water restrictions have become the norm. One is told that it is ‘climate change’, and I’m beginning to believe it. Though I have lived here for about thirty years, this is the most severe drought yet. I have even lost two Eucalyptus trees, which anyone with any garden knowledge will know, is almost unheard of. Unfortunately I still sit with a large garden. To witness the dying of citrus trees and other softer plants that I planted years ago, has been an emotional experience. To work in the garden, especially during summer, has become almost fruitless. I have been happy to let Nature take over to a great degree, sorting out the survivors form the dainties, and the garden is beginning to look like a sturdy and self-opinionated jungle; scrub with attitude. In a way I’m beginning to rather like it. For a committed gardener to have to spend more gardening time indoors, is also a thing to get used to. What better way than to bring a sense of gardening to the creation of the digital imagery I keep myself busy with these days. “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” said Henri Matisse very wisely, so somewhere between reality and the imagination, I manage to keep the memory of the garden alive, until the next rainy season. Nicolaas Maritz, Darling, 2018
Link to DIGITAL GARDENING video: https://youtu.be/NywUGFANlbg
https://sites.google.com/site/nicolaasmaritzgallery/