Childhood Memory

Louise Graham

Oct 12

4 min read

Some landscapes live inside you long after the landscape itself has changed.

When I look at this painting, I see the Highveld of my childhood.

Before the mine heaps. Before the large commercial farms. Before so much of the open veld was divided, developed and disturbed.

I remember a time when you could look out across the veld and it seemed as though your view went on forever. There was nothing standing in your way. You could breathe.

Perhaps that is what I was really trying to paint here.

Not simply a road, an old eucalyptus and an open stretch of grass.

Freedom.

When a farm was just a farm

I was a town girl, but farms were part of my childhood.

A farm was somewhere you could disappear to for a weekend or a holiday. Somewhere you could milk cows, ride horses, play in the hay, throw kleilat in the stream and spend hours simply walking through the grass.

There was no schedule for childhood.

There was nowhere in particular that we needed to be.

The cattle grazed quietly. Early mornings had a stillness that could catch your breath. The veld seemed endless, and as children, I think we believed our freedom was endless too.

There weren't always enough saddles for everyone.

If the girls were using them, the boys simply rode the horses bareback.

It was as uncomplicated as that.

And somewhere among those memories is Oom Ben, looking for a ring I had lost in a heap of hay while we were playing.

Such a small memory.

But perhaps those are the ones that matter most.

I don't remember grand events. I remember hay. Horses. Cows. Streams. Grass against my legs. People who had time to look for a child's lost ring.

I remember space.

*The first sketch — before there was colour, there was already a tree, a road and an open horizon.*

A landscape that has changed

Driving through the Highveld now feels very different.

There are mine heaps where there was once an uninterrupted horizon. There are vast agricultural operations and development. There is machinery and noise where, in my memory at least, there was once an extraordinary quiet.

Of course, childhood memories are imperfect things. Perhaps the world was never quite as untouched as I remember it.

But that's almost beside the point.

Because Childhood Memory isn't a historical record of the Highveld.

It is my Highveld.

The one that remains somewhere in my memory.

Painting what I remember

That is why I didn't want to fill this painting.

The emptiness matters.

The road needs somewhere to disappear. The old eucalyptus needs room around it. The distant trees need to remain distant, and the horizon needs to feel as though, if you kept walking towards it, it would simply keep moving farther away.

*The landscape beginning to emerge — but with the openness already firmly established.*

Even while I was painting, I repeatedly felt the temptation to add more—another tree, more foliage, more detail in the veld.

But every time I did, I risked losing the very thing I was trying to remember.

Space.

The eucalyptus became the one solid presence in the painting: old, weathered and imperfect. Around it, everything becomes progressively softer. The road disappears. The trees become little more than marks.

Eventually the veld meets the enormous sky.

It isn't the Highveld exactly as it was.

It is the Highveld as I remember it.

No more freedom

Perhaps that is why there is a sadness in this painting for me.

When I think back now, that childhood can seem almost like a dream.

There are no more weekends exactly like those ones. No more being the town child sent off to the farm. No more Oom Ben searching through the hay. No more boys jumping onto horses without saddles because the girls got there first.

And no more believing that there was absolutely nothing to keep us back.

We grew up.

The landscape changed.

And somewhere along the way, that particular kind of freedom disappeared too.

But perhaps this is one of the reasons I paint.

Because on a 41 × 50.5 cm piece of canvas, I can go back.

I can put the mine heaps beyond the horizon.

I can quiet the machinery.

I can give the cattle their stillness again.

I can stand beside an old eucalyptus and look across the grass, and there is nothing in my way.

When I look back at the first marks I made for this painting, I realise that very little of the idea actually changed. There was a tree. There was a road. And there was an enormous amount of empty space beyond it.

The painting became more detailed as I worked, but the memory at its heart remained remarkably simple:

A road, an open veld and the feeling that there was nothing stopping you from going wherever you wanted.

For a little while, the Highveld can go on forever again.