Who was Keith Alexander?

In his quest to find artist Keith Alexander’s Namibia, Nick van der Leek discovers something beautiful balancing on the other side of hyper reality.

Pictures: Nick van der Leek and Keith Alexander: The Artist in Restrospect, Jonathan Ball Publishers

I have met Keith Alexander but it’s terribly frustrating that I can’t remember the encounter. When I pass Bitterfontein, roughly halfway to Namibia from Cape Town, I get a strange inkling. Alexander’s art is simple, his surreal themes clear – but finding them, just like holding onto early childhood memories, isn’t going to be easy.

Right now everything is wrong. The light for instance – it’s too bright. Alexander’s paintings of failing farmsteads and broken homes, like the one he did here at Bitterfontein, are painted in near darkness, as if the artist painted them from a hot-air balloon, a helicopter or low-flying UFO. There are also few reference points to anchor the viewer. What’s that all about? And how the heck am I supposed to get myself into those selfsame vantage points?

From Bitterfontein I have a long way to go and the nuclear balloon is starting to dim. I shoot past Springbok and then it starts happening… the land unfolds on itself. It stretches out, revealing distant mountain ranges and opening up to reveal more ranges beyond a boundless horizon. Impossible vistas materialise at every turn in the road.

I’m minutes away from exiting South Africa and entering Namibia, when two jackals scamper across the road. I stop to watch them run into a bright-purple tapestry of colour. Far-off mountains glint gold.

The jackal is another favourite animal haunting Alexander’s art; and crows, desert creatures that scavenge off the mistakes of the dead. I descend through sweeping arcs of iron-hard rock. The sun has gone. The edge of Namibia in the eerie dusk already feels like another planet.

As I snake along the fossilised canyon, I wonder about Alexander’s art. I think about his images painted after dark. What is he trying to convey with his glowing, egg-yellow interiors? Why is he juxtaposing that amniotic warmth with ominous dunes polished by a silver moon?

Alexander’s art invariably shows some man-made centrepiece decaying in seas of sand. Invariably, the man-made thing, whether an old motor car, locomotive or steel ship, is a ruined island of human invention, wasting away under the onslaught of Africa’s relentless elements. We’re witnessing a war of attrition and, without exception, man is losing his battle against the forces of nature.

As soon as I cross the turbid, silvery Orange River, I feel myself crossing into another world. Star Wars begins in the desert of a planet called Tatooine (filmed in Morocco). It starts with the words, ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ Namibia feels like that. A faraway place lost in time.

Immediately after crossing into Namibia I’m disorientated. In the dark, a creamy, dirt road plays tricks on me. The corrugations immediately set about rattling the vehicle, trying to break it. I’m disoriented less by darkness than by time. According to my GPS I’m already at my destination. Because of this I disregard the GPS instructions and take a dirt road in the right direction, but it’s the wrong road.

After 15km I realise my mistake and make a U-turn. The vehicle gets stuck in thick sand and I spend two hours digging it out. I use a flip-flop to scrape away the dirt. It’s gruelling labour in the pitch dark of the open veld. When I arrive at my destination, Canon Village, just opposite the gaping chasm of the Fish River Canyon, it’s well past midnight.

I bang on doors but no one answers. So I spend my first night in Namibia sleeping in the car. I’m awakened twice by the cold, and have to turn the engine on to heat up the interior. Eventually morning comes. I wake inside a landscape where persistent waters have scoured rock down to its two-billion-year-old basement. That’s half as old as the age of Earth. After breakfast I hike through a massive arch of rock, and along pavements and edifices above an ancient plain. My body still feels incredibly bruised from all my digging the night before.

My hands, too, are scratched from scraping at dirt. But the silence is a salve. I pass cairns of rock, and rocks cracked into unreal patterns. I walk on. My skin, especially my neck, begins to burn under the bleeding desert sun. The Namib is a tricky place. Few plants exist here and many that do are poisonous, like the Euphorbia virosa (a name that evokes Furiosa of Mad Max, recently filmed in Namibia). Once a group of tourists used dried-out euphorbia cactus logs to make a braai, and everyone died because even the smoke from this toxic plant is deadly.

Below me another colossal canvas spreads into the distance. In the foreground I see where subterranean forces have bubbled to the surface, creating piles of dark dolerite. There are many places in Namibia where piles of rock seem to have been built by man, or stacked on one another but, no, Nature built these Lego-like piles.

This surreal place is Alexander’s canvas and, as if things couldn’t get any weirder (or more wonderful), this is also the domain of Alexander’s Desert Monarch (the gemsbok). Again and again I come upon a solitary sentinel haunting an extensive emptiness. Invariably the gemsbok stops and turns to look at me as if to say, “What are you doing here?”

The iconic gemsbok is undoubtedly the star of Keith Alexander’s show. Again and again, it seems to materialise out of the metamorphic fabric. Suddenly one is standing there staring at me. When a gemsbok looks at me like that, the ground stirs beneath my feet. At Canon Village a gemsbok stares at me through my window. This is classic Keith Alexander stuff.

And so I drive on, north to the dunes and icy sea of Lüderitz. I visit Diaz Point where I get another inkling. Alexander’s art, like this landscape, spans 500 hundred years of history. One of his favourite subjects is ships. He’s even painted the Titanic, and I guess there’s some irony in that too – painting this colossal ship triumphantly sailing the seas… well, we know where that hubris ended up, don’t we?

Alexander’s thematic scope spans wide swathes of time, which is why his ships aren’t made just of steel, but wood. It’s also why some of his masts feature tattered sails. Bartolomeu Dias, a knight of the Portuguese empire searching for a sea route to the East, came ashore here (circa 1488) to what his men saw as a God-forsaken hell.

Dias didn’t get much further than Lüderitz – four ships and their entire crews disappeared in a storm near the Cape. No ships and none of those hundred or more skeletons have been found. Dias’ dreams, just like the Titanic, were defeated by the whims of Nature. And this is the essence of Alexander’s art – Nature as the slayer of dreams. Doomed ships and their doomed crews is just one of the themes Alexander, an ex-Rhodesian, explored. It’s a big canvas, when you think about it. How do you portray the attempts to colonise a country that cannot be colonised? The attempts to build an empire across a country designed to break men, their machines and their dreams into little pieces?

The ghost town of Kolmanskop is just outside Lüderitz, and it’s in this little enclave that Alexander found a treasure trove of inspiration. Surreal yet real. Surreal because the houses at Kolmanskop feel haunted with memory, like something out of a dream, or possibly someone’s nightmare. What we see are broken egg shells that were once elegant and opulent mansions belonging to German mining barons. There it is again – Nature the slayer of dreams. And it’s not just human wreckage lying on a derelict landscape. There are also animals – healthy, flourishing, thriving, in the absence f man. In the jackal there’s possibly a nod to an idiosyncratic Namibian deity. This deity is buried and reborn again and again, which is why it has many graves (cairns) all over Namibia. Eventually, according to folklore, this deity found its form as the jackal.

My first revelation of Alexander comes here, at Kolmanskop, at the same place where he brought his wife Elizabeth. They came here in a battered Mercedes-Benz to celebrate their honeymoon. They came many times to photograph and capture material for yet another overseas exhibition that would sell out.

While the wind gusts and dust swirls outside, I rifle through some research papers. I find Alexander’s own words about the land seizures in Zimbabwe, and he’s watching them on television. The words Alexander uses to describe watching the news of these seizures are ‘violence’ and ‘helpless’.

His family came to Africa thanks to the arch imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. They started farming about 100km north of present-day Bulawayo (then Salisbury). The trauma of losing a legacy and, more, the struggle of the European to assert himself in Africa, permeates much of Alexander’s art. There’s humour, occasionally, but a darker dystopia forms a strong undercurrent to much of his work.

Having made some headway on the man behind the desert mythology, I begin to make my way out of Namibia along the same road that brought me here. But questions remain. Why is it that I can’t remember meeting one of my favourite artists?

Keith Alexander’s epic desert scenes are some of the most expensive African art out there; his paintings typically sell for more than R300 000. Besides being world famous, his beautiful but disquieting scenes are the kind of intellectually riveting stuff I’d put on the walls of my home if I could afford it. And then I remember how, in the early eighties, I met him on the Wild Coast. I was a lighty, while Alexander was tall and thin and in his thirties. He had just become a South African citizen. The bearded, khaki-clad desert cowboy resembled a hybrid of Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg.

Uncharacteristically, I kick over a cairn of teetering rock. To not respect these cairns invites misfortune. I drive to the viewpoint over the Fish River Canyon at Hobas. Sure enough, when I arrive at the lookout point I have a flat tyre.  After repairing it, I venture towards the abyss. The colossal silence calls to me. Keith Alexander died at just 52 from brain cancer, his wife six months later. Life is fragile, even the memories of life are constantly slipping away from us. But, next to this delicateness of who we are, the quietude of a canyon is Nature’s own portrait of resilience.

Irma Stern in her Own Words

South Africa’s most valuable and, arguably, gifted artist spent a lifetime searching throughout Africa and the world. But did she find what or who she was looking for?

Words: Nick van der Leek

Pictures: Nick van der Leek and Supplied

I’m hoping to get a sense of what’s so ‘outstanding’ about Irma Stern at an auction. Hobnobbing with the haut monde, mixing with aristocrats – isn’t it going to be a fool’s errand? This is not only the first artist I’m going to meet at an auction, it’s my first time at an art auction anywhere, ever. I doubt it’s going to be enough, but I have to start somewhere.

As I arrive the auction kicks off. Behind the auctioneer is a small square painting. I see first-hand the white tannie in a green jacket wearing a Basuto hat produced in 1943. I’m surprised none of the artists are introduced, nor is there any backstory to their works. There’s just a mercenary naming and selling.

Well-heeled millionaires lift their numbers to timidly add tens or hundreds of thousands to a bid. I suddenly wish I had brought a few odd thousand for some of the artworks. Well, to be honest, I wish I had a few hundred thousand lying around so I could afford them. Some lovely Hugo Naudés and Boonzaiers are snapped up by some lucky bloke.

Two Pierneefs and a Tretchikoff go for half a million and more than a million. The Stern is by far the most expensive artwork of the evening, and goes for five times the second-most expensive Pierneef, bringing
the hammer down at R5 115 600.

On my way out, I take a close look at the original Basuto hat in a glass case, and then emerge from the egg-yellow cocoon of the Wanderer’s Club into the cold Joburg night. As I thought, the auction wasn’t much help.

I do have a secret weapon with me, a small paperback in my hand, Remembering Irma, by Mona Berman [Double Storey 2003].

On my way to Zululand the next morning, I begin thumbing through it while waiting in traffic at a tollgate. ‘Irma was extremely curious about the Mangbetu – who, she heard, ‘only one generation back had been man-eaters.’ She was determined to make contact with them. After meeting them and being allowed to paint them, she described the people with great admiration:

‘It was strange to plunge right among so savage a tribe and yet only to be aware of a rare artistic taste which had for years been exciting and stimulating the art world of Europe. Here were the creators of magnificent pieces of sculpture, carved out of wood, of fetishes and masks, grotesque and beautiful revealing primitive ancestral worship and its world alive with spirits…’

As banana plantations unfold around me, I begin to connect the first dots. Mona Berman used to be Mona Feldman, Freda Feldman’s daughter. Freda, the tannie in the Basuto hat, was a very close friend of Stern’s, and Stern wrote many letters to her over the years.

When Freda died Mona inherited a box of letters. At one stage Mona transcribed all the letters onto her computer, but when she updated her software, the computer was formatted and all the data lost. Another book was published at that time, so Mona decided to leave things at that, and Irma Stern’s own words were trapped, as if behind a locked door whose key had been lost forever.

My road along the N3 is never straight. It loops like a rollercoaster, at one point shooting through one side of a cloud and out the other.

But in 2001 it occurred to Mona that if she didn’t resurrect Irma’s letters to her mother ‘a chapter of her life’ would be lost. And so she did. Not only did this bring context back to Stern’s legacy, but Stern herself.

Mona introduces us to Irma, and Irma introduces us to Freda. What makes it authentic is Mona’s initial dislike for – as a teenager – and even embarrassment of, an abrasive, overbearing and increasingly overweight woman. Through Mona we see through the lurid expressionism; Stern suddenly becomes simultaneously less stern and more Stern, but also more Irma.

Mona’s dislike for Irma began with a drawing of baby Mona, nude of course, which Mona describes – not unreasonably – as ‘the insensitivity of the adult world invading the privacy of the young’. Mona as a young adult got the better of Irma, cracking jokes with her buddies about Irma’s bulk behind her back.

‘I showed little kindness to Irma. I could not see beyond her size, her eccentricities, her petulant manner and her egotistical lifestyle. Like most people I felt awkward and ignorant in her company. I did not know what to say to her, and when I found something to say she seemed to pay no attention’.

If Irma was a snob, Freda was not, and perhaps this partly accounted for the fierce loyalty the two women shared. When Irma visited the Feldmans, poor Mona described these visits as invasions too, for ‘she took over our lives, transforming my parents into people we did not know, who no longer had time for their own children, so busy were they attending to her never-ending needs.’ Other painters’ artworks had to be hidden away when Irma came to visit.

So Irma was high maintenance. But she was also fascinating. On one occasion, hearing the movement of furniture at dawn, Mona snuck downstairs and caught the artist painting their fireplace. She rushed to tell her mother, but Freda swore her daughter to remain quiet so as not to disturb Irma. Mona watched breathlessly as the large woman spun her magic wand. When she was done, she’d left behind something priceless, tethered permanently to the very fabric of Feldman’s home.

Mona also reveals amazing insights into Irma’s appetite. No sooner had Irma painted a still life (with food or fruit in it), ‘she would devour them’. Through Mona we find letters where Irma herself admits to her preoccupation with food, ‘I feel as though my face was made of fruit, my arms and breast are bananas and apples, my nose a prune, my hair lots of carrots’.

The most important member of Stern’s household was Charlie, the cook, who Stern apparently brought back from Zanzibar, along with a pair of hand-carved wooden doors.

On another occasion, Freda went to pick up Irma at a gallery in Eloff Street, with Mona cowering in embarrassment out of sight in the back seat. Irma climbed into the car exasperated with the gallery owner. “I feel like screaming,” she declared, to which Freda answered, “Then scream.” And so scream Irma did, a high-pitched shriek Mona writes she will ‘never forget’. Eloff street became Mona’s ‘Avenue of Shame’, but the stress relief worked because afterwards the artist was ‘quite cheerful’.

I arrive in Durban at night with minibuses diving left and right like it is the Wild West. On a slim sliver of Zululand sandwiched between concrete highways and bridges, I notice a solitary figure making a small, bright fire for himself. After a long time behind the wheel, I drive along the beachfront in search of a hotel. Huge Indian Ocean waves pound the dark Earth.

‘I am at present just in a slight state of overwork and depression – suffer from terrible dreams and am taking it easy for a few days – getting my hats and shoes in order and so forth…’ But deeper things were nagging, as she wrote in 1935, ‘It looks to me – this is my last trip trying to find things that are dying out – thanks to ourselves.’

Sometimes it seems as though Stern was a European artist who belonged to and in Europe. ‘I do not know how I shall fit into African boredom again – I have re-acquired all my European habits of love for everything the best. Fashionable allures…red lacquered nails…the most fascinating hats and shoes are mine – If I think of Adderley Street I shudder. Maybe I go straight up to Zululand’.

The next morning, that’s exactly where I am, walking along the beachfront. It suddenly feels like another world – rich with faces, salty, summery. If Stern was a product of European finery, she was also part of an identity that was trying to survive in the world, especially in the 1940s.

If Stern was used to her refinements, Africa was worth letting go of them to find herself. In Africa she discovered the raw tribalism lacking in civilised Europe. This was a world rich with life, rich with idiosyncrasy and authenticity. This was a place where people thrived at simply being who they were. But Stern was also capturing the last flickers of a dying Africa.

In February 1955 Irma wrote about losing the ‘lovely fairy-tale outlook on Native life’ of her early work. ‘It can hardly continue when I see the most lovely people acting not like children but like devils… I can understand their sudden awakening and finding their land full of white raced people [she was referring to Kenya]…who have their foot on their necks…but still I cannot say I am looking happy and peacefully into the future of our South Africa. We are just passionately awaiting a huge blood bath….stoking on it daily – hourly – giving with the left hand and taking with the right… I am wondering where to go’.

It is on the boulevards of Durban that I see Irma Stern, not for the end of her journey but the beginning. Stern died an agonising death from complications of diabetes in 1966, just prior to an exhibition she believed would have ‘made her’.

What really made Irma Stern?

She was Jewish-German from a very wealthy family born in Schweitzer-Renecke. Stern’s father was interned in a concentration camp by the British during the Boer War because of his pro-Boer leanings. Irma and her younger brother were secreted to Cape Town by their mother. After the war, the Sterns returned to Germany and travelled constantly. This travelling lifestyle influenced not merely Irma’s work, but her identity.

She found her identity not in the finery of Europe or an extravagant lifestyle, but in Africa. In Africa she felt the loss and the threat upon her own identity and sense of self in the plight of Africa, and the Africans. It was Stern’s relationship with all these fading people and idiosyncratic tribal personalities that resonated with her. It was searching for the fairy-tale ending to the threat on her own identity, and the lingering threat on the Jewish identity.

Stern’s expressionism was a vivid and vivacious shield against the deprivations and invasions of a cruel world and the Natural Order. But rather than in her expressionistic opposition to the world, it was in those rare instances of dreamy impressionism that Stern found herself.

She identified so much with her White Lilies, painted in March 1941, that she chose to be photographed in front of them. A Cape Argus reviewer called the work ‘among the best things she has done’.

Three years later Stern did another painting, simply titled Lilies. Instead of abrasive they were sublime. Instead of a dark, meaty, tribalistic caricature there is subtlety, nuance and harmony.

The colours are crisp instead of cartoonish, creamy instead of saucy. The effect is one of concord, where the artist has unlearned what she had learned and, in so doing, has undone what she had been doing.

In Lilies, we see a softness and a quietude that speaks not only of the depths of Irma Stern’s relationship with the world and the people in it, but also of the relationship between the world and a person.

Sometimes what is broken can be restored, sometimes what is unforgiven can be healed. Sometimes what is lost can be found.

Gwelo Goodman, Master of Sunshine

Nick van der Leek reflects on how Robert Gwelo Goodman had to change to matter as an artist…

Words: Nick van der Leek, @HiRezLife

To find the Englishman who came to Africa, changed his name and eventually became the master of sunshine, we have to move in the way he did. We must get away from steering wheels and controls, and allow ourselves to be transported. We’re not taking the train on a whim.

Goodman (1871-1939) was the son of a British Railways worker, and in 1888 the 17-year-old Goodman became a railways clerk, initially in Paarl, later in Newlands.

Our Hogwarts Express hides in plain sight. It’s called the Blue Train and I’m on it right now, leaving Cape Town harbour and the present far behind. As I begin my journey north, the Blue Train rata-tatting over curling sun-kissed tracks, the dining cabin swaying slightly, a teacup tilting on its saucer, I look at the name on my notepad. Robert. Gwelo. Goodman. Why Gwelo?

I go through my notes. As the 19th century drew to a close, Goodman (not yet Gwelo) returned to Europe, spent time in Paris and then many more years in London and Chelsea. But that’s not all. Grania Ogilvie’s comprehensive Dictionary of South African Painters and Sculptors provides this summary of Goodman’s movements over a 35-year period:

• 1886-94 lived in Cape Town
• 1894-97 in France
• 1897-1915 lived in England [visiting South Africa frequently]
• 1903 and 1905 India
• 1907 travelled to Italy, Spain, Ireland, Scotland and the Lake District
• 1910 visited Venice
• 1915 returned to South Africa
• 1916 visited Namibia, 1917 spent six months in Johannesburg painting mine dumps
• 1918-19 visited the Drakensberg and Durban

What is the point of visiting so many places? In 1900, while ensconced in England, Lord Roberts permitted Goodman to travel back to South Africa to sketch the battlefields of the Anglo-Boer War. That’s the equivalent of the modern-day embedded journalist, putting himself in harm’s way. It’s bold, it’s dangerous, it’s a sure-fire route to adventure but you know, as Maya Angelou once put it, ‘Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest’.

We have to plunge ourselves again and again into the unknown, one brave act followed by another, in order to build a life of real substance. Is this train like that, a magical rail across the South African countryside? Or am I just sitting in comfort, coasting along on someone else’s dream?

At Worcester I get out and stand on the platform. The train is already hot and brutal, fuming. How do we go from seeing the familiar landscape we know as South Africans, to seeing it as visitors, and becoming the potential heroes of our countryside? And why Robert Gwelo Goodman?

In 1901, when Robert Goodman was 30 years old and exhibiting Boer War artworks at Grafton Galleries in England and the Cape Town Technical Institute, he lamented to Cape Town art instructor J S Morland about the difficulty he was having in making a name for himself on the London art scene. Goodman – the name – just wasn’t good enough. Morland thought Robert needed something more distinctive, more African.

The central, then-Rhodesian town of Gwelo (founded in 1895, the same year Goodman began his art career, and now called Gweru) somehow made sense. The town named after the Kalanga word kwelu (pheasant) exports flowers, chromite and boasts Zimbabwe’s largest railway marshalling yard. It’s a town founded on trade, enterprise and transport.

As my train slips further into the vastness of the Karoo, I contemplate the loss of a countryside and the loss of ourselves. What is the essence of a land, what is the essence of a man? Memories. Moments.

On one side of the window: caviar, croissants, scones, chocolate cake and Earl Grey tea. On the other side: the infinite Karoo. Rinsed skies and pale pastels washing by the window. Are past and present fused into the unquiet, unfolding moment of creation? If so, can we not be part of our own creation?

I alight from the train at Matjiesfontein. My head swims with champagne and my blood bursts with the sugary rush of vetkoek. In my delirium, with the bright Lord Milner Hotel looming against the sun, I want to know about Goodman’s birthplace. Taplow. Why does that name ring a bell?

It’s situated – it turns out – one railway stop before Maidenhead, travelling from London. I lived in Maidenhead for a year, and Taplow was just eight minutes’ drive away. Taplow has a pit 83 million years old with evidence of oyster shells and sea-slug fossils. The pit is a sign that the sea once drowned most of Buckinghamshire. Taplow meanwhile is named after a 6th century king buried in the area under a great mound, Viking style.

Now the train has stopped in the middle of nowhere. The steely murmur of the track speaks of another approaching train. The engine, as it passes, is like a living thing, hissing, clattering. Goodman’s England is like this train too: powerful, loud, vulgar and sophisticated. I wonder, was Goodman too?

In the foreword to his biography Gwelo Goodman, South African Artist by Joyce Newton Thompson he’s described as a cocky, conceited, rude little man but the same source calls him an ‘attractive, stimulating, vital man’. I glance out the window for inspiration. The Karoo, like Goodman’s birthplace, was once the bottom of the sea. How the world has changed. How the world can change. And how Goodman had to change to matter as an artist.

Goodman needed many years to appreciate the South African light for what it is. An Englishman, like my great-grandfather (Dutch artist Tinus de Jongh), will visit these shores and for many years still see his own country in the new country.

He will see a pale sky and pale sunlight, and dark copses, and dreary lakes. It takes courage to let go of your schooling and experience, and step into the real world, to see what is really there and not what you are taught to see. Not one act of courage, but many, until finally, one fine day:

‘In his sun-splashed buildings he has [given] us the splendour of our rugged mountains and the torrid brilliance of our blazing sun’. EF Watermeyer, who wrote a foreword in Gwelo Goodman’s biography. Or, as Bilbo the Hobbit put it, ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door… if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’– J R R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

When I awake I’m in Kimberley, and on a whim I get off there. After a restless night too close to the train station, listening to the freights of time shunting back and forth, I rise into a pale golden morning. What hope is there of finding Goodman here? From the train station to the William Humphreys Art Gallery it’s a chilly ten minute walk.

As I arrive, the gallery opens and Goodman is there, resplendent in roses. On one occasion, Goodman told a reporter in Johannesburg, ‘I paint roses, I was going to say as well as any man alive, but probably better. Fantin-Latour is the only rival I have ever had as a rose-painter’.

Goodman’s roses are undoubtedly well done but, as art historian Esmé Berman puts it, the ‘composition [of] almost all… his flower-pieces is unimaginative and academic’. Thankfully his landscapes are anything but. And now I’d like to see one. I’m told there’s another gallery two hours’ drive from here that has a spectacular Gwelo Goodman. On a 180km-long, flat road, I contemplate Goodman’s roses. England had its War of the Roses, and we had our wars, including with England. It was one of the longest and bloodiest wars in British history and cost England dearly – £22 billion adjusted for inflation.

Goodman may not have known about other contemporary painters of roses (Van Gogh and Georgia O’ Keeffe) and overestimated his own skill at blooms, but he eventually became a master of the South African sun. The tawny veld whispering beside my window has not forgotten the red coats Goodman painted or the press of crumbling gravestones. Salt pans and anthills outside my window are bleached by an angry sun in a blinding blue bowl.

Boonzaier escaped the problem of the South African sun by painting sunless scenes. What did Gwelo do? It turns out Gwelo was more courageous – like a train, hot and brutal, blustering. It took time but Goodman eventually ‘intensified his palette’ as Berman puts it. He wove vibrant orange and yellow highlights into mauve middle tones and dark, earthy shadows. Light and dark, blood and earth. I wonder, is everything a contradiction, and does truth lie in these contradictions?

It’s a bright, warm, dreamy winter’s day in Bloemfontein as I take the steps inside the lovely Oliewenhuis Art Museum. On the first floor is a Goodman, perhaps the largest painting in the entire gallery, sporting the most lavish frame. Behind the glass, and my own reflection in it, is a dark scene.

A Scottish woodland. What’s it doing here? A Highland scene covered in snow and caught in shadow, except for a bright ribbon of ice glowing in sunlight. I step back and glance at an enormous Pierneef to my left. It’s nowhere near as colossal, or as dark or bright as this.

In the basement is an even brighter work by Goodman called The Rock. It is so bright the archivist admits there is some controversy about the work – is it the original or has it been retouched? Because the white sun leaps off the canvas as though applied a few hours ago rather than before my father was born.

Joyce Newton-Thompson would have appreciated the controversy over The Rock, and perhaps Goodman would too. Before departing the City of Roses, I have an unexpected encounter with a large spider at a front door. According to Wikipedia, so did another former resident of Bloemfontein, JRR Tokien: ‘As a child, he was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some think later echoed in his stories…’

As the deep blue of the Drakensberg builds in the bright distance, I’m aware of a trade, born in sickness between this country and that. Tolkien’s father died of rheumatic fever, Goodman came to South Africa in 1911 to recover from it. England gave us Goodman, and Goodman gave to England and a worldwide audience a more acute sense of the South African palette, something Esmé Berman refers to as Goodman’s ‘flickering tapestry’. And South Africa gave Tolkien back to England, prompting him to write about the loss of the countryside and country folk:

‘It was a kind of lost paradise… There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did…’

Tolkien lived right beside one of only two working mills in England. Goodman lived inside beautiful Cape Dutch homesteads, and restored them from within and without. As he grew older, his interest in architecture and gardens grew, until finally, when the world wound down to war, Goodman settled on flower studies.

Like Tolkien, there was something impish about the man who grew up on and around trains. Gwelo mastered pastels first; this is where his oil paintings find their maturity. He was a man who played golf, fished for trout; he was a big-game hunter who controversially shot an elephant. The railway man had come a long way, hadn’t he?

Johans Borman’s online biography credits Goodman’s ‘considerable impact on South African art… as well as encouraging the young Gregoire Boonzaier… Newton Thompson describes his…dramatic sense of colour, its self-confidence; the profound affection it shows for the beauty of our own country…[Gwelo] remained steadfast to certain eternal verities in art, believing in the values of hard work and individualism over the emerging modernist ideas.’ And to paraphrase Maya Angelou, without honesty we cannot have decent art.

Gwelo mastered that most difficult of subjects, the South African sun. He built and improved houses and brought the vibrancy of the outdoors and the garden to put inside them. It was more than just capturing beauty, it was finding home away from home.