Watercolours capture beauty of ruins
Durban - An exhibition of paintings at Ballito’s Lifestyle Centre features Hillcrest artist Lauriana Glenny’s “Stories of Durban”, capturing the “beauty in a city that’s limping along”.
Alongside the oils is a sketchbook featuring a watercolour pictures of more images. Among them is a view of the KZN Children’s Hospital, next to Addington on South Beach. Thanks to much community determination, it is in mid-transformation from a ruin towards becoming a facility where children, no matter their families’ incomes, will have access to health care.
Part of it is renovated and up and running, while other parts still need work.
The watercolour picture in the a sketchbook at Ballito planted an idea in her head of making a sketchbook that would exclusively feature paintings of the sections of the hospital that are still in ruins, expressing in watercolours her personal mandate “to find beauty in unexpected places”.
The hospital sketchbook starts with images at the entrance and ends at the cupola. Alongside many of her paintings are thoughts that come to mind, such as “all your memories are stuck inside your bone marrow” and “detail of the cupola standing tall and proud on the roof as a beacon of hope and strength to the children of Durban”.
Usually more of a painter in oils, Glenny chose to do the sketchbook in watercolour for both practical and artistic reasons.
Practical because “I did it in watercolour simply because I was doing it half off-site and half on site, so I needed to travel with my watercolours” and oil can take days to dry. And artistic because watercolours give a very immediate impression.
“I felt it was so relevant a medium to catch because watercolour has a slightly transient feel to it and the images that are captured are (of places that are) in a state of being transformed.”
It makes sense of the decay, Glenny added.
“A lot of the walls were exposed to the elements, so it looks like a patch of the water running down where the paint got dribbled and splashed, and eroded from time and weather.
“I’ve layered it with some spray paint texture as well because it creates more of a mood and because it’s grungy too. It’s in the inner city and the inner city doesn’t necessarily have an apparent beauty to it if you don’t look hard enough. It’s not just how you look at things, but how you see things.”
To access the most decayed part of the complex, the old nurses’ home, Glenny had to remove planks from windows and venture through an area to which vagrants had added further destruction with fires and where floorboards were so rotten they were dangerous to walk on.
In there she found gems that she has recorded in her sketchbook, such as an old crutch lying among the debris, and the ruins of a theatre where the nurses once held concerts and dances.
“Because of the state of neglect, you got to see behind the façade – the bones of what was behind the cladding. The skeletons of the building laid bare.”
Once renovated, that section of the hospital will accommodate the mothers of child patients.
However, mountains of donations are still needed to bring the KZN Children’s Hospital into full operation.
Glenny is about to embark on a new project at the hospital, painting oil portraits of child patients who are beneficiaries of the hospital, for fund-raising through an auction last this year.
She would like to bequeath her sketchbook of watercolours of the hospital’s ruins to hospital fund-raising too, either in its original form or copies, if a sponsor comes forward to help with printing.
Tomorrow is the Ballito “Stories of Durban” exhibition final day.
The Independent on Saturday