Stumps, Day One

Cricket season has hit, so I'm using that as part excuse for not blogging.  The other reason is that I've taken on the secretarial duties at the Art Society and, wow, what a learning curve.  But I'm getting there and hopefully will be jacked enough to find time to paint and blog again.  And to leave comments on your blogs!

I did make a promise to myself though, that whatever happened, I would paint with my groups every Monday and Friday mornings.  Well, I'm still doing that on Friday, but on Monday I have started with a fantastic watercolour teacher, so I'm looking at big improvements in my frustrating watercolour paintings!

But just to show I haven't been totally idle with a paint brush, I took this pic when India was here in South Africa playing the test at Newlands, of two of the South African batsmen leaving the ground at the end of a day's play.

And I thought it doubly fitting to post this as the ICC Cricket World Cup is currently on in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Kallis

Well, I'm now back in sunny South Africa and what a temperature shock it's been. Leaving Stockholm airport at minus 5 deg C (that's 23 deg F in old money!) and arriving back in Cape Town to soaring temperatures of 38 deg C (100.4 deg F)! These first two days at home have been sweltering and the news has been that fires have destroyed one of the wine farms in Paarl and are still raging in the area. Yesterday we couldn't see Table Mountain because of all the smoke blowing through from the countryside. I know I miss the family, but with this heat, a little bit of that snow (a teeny bit!) .... maybe that would be nice as well.

But one of the nice things about coming back home is that I can now watch the cricket and rugby again. So, to celebrate that fact, I am posting a painting I did just before I left, of one our "boys" who is a household name right around the cricketing world, Jacques Kallis.

It is also a sort of celebratory painting as it was done just as he achieved his 10 000th test run in world cricket. He is the only Test cricketer in the history of the game to hold more than 10 000 runs AND 250 wickets. He also has over 10 000 runs in One Day Internationals.

Hope you like it.

166 - SOLD

As anybody who knows me would know, I am an avid cricket fan. It sometimes gets so bad, that when we were playing against Australia (who are the World Champions) in Melbourne in this last test, I would set the alarm for 1am and spend the rest of the night watching cricket. Absolute madness I know. But it was worth it when we won and, even better, for the first time ever, South Africa won a test match series IN Australia. Unfortunately we are struggling a bit in the last test in Sydney, but tomorrow's the last day and anything can happen!

The absolute hero of the Melbourne test was a young Western Province cricketer, JP Duminy who got his debut century and went on to make 166. This portrait is of him batting during that century with Brad Haddin, the Aussie wicketkeeper behind the stumps.

Now I know that cricket is a complicated game if you haven't been brought up with it. A while ago I sent an explanation of cricket to V ... Vaughn and thought that I would include it here as well. It's called the "Tea Towel Explanation of Cricket" - just for a laugh!

The Famous Tea Towel Explanation of Cricket.

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

HOWZAT!