I Want to Feel the Storm

This painting is beginning to demand more from me than I originally expected.

I started with a photograph of a storm moving across the bushveld at sunset. What first caught me was the drama of it — an immense dark sky pressing down over the veld, while underneath it a narrow band of golden light still clung stubbornly to the horizon. In the distance, rain was already falling.

It was beautiful.

But the longer I have worked on the painting, the more I’ve realised that beautiful isn’t enough.

I don’t want to simply paint a convincing picture of a storm.

I want to feel the storm.

I want to smell the rain when I look at this painting.

I want to feel as though I am standing on the stoep of an old farmhouse somewhere deep in the bushveld, watching the weather moving towards me. There is still shelter behind me, but everything in front of me is open — miles of veld beneath an enormous African sky.

The rain hasn’t reached me yet.

I can hear it falling in the distance.

There is something unmistakable about that sound: a low, continuous rush coming from somewhere beyond the trees. You watch the curtain of rain moving across the bush and know that eventually it will reach you.

The air has changed. The light has changed.

And the veld has become strangely still.

The Violence Above, the Quiet Below

That contrast is becoming the heart of this painting.

Above, I want the clouds to feel almost ferocious.

They shouldn’t simply be dark shapes in a sky. I want them to have weight — enormous masses of water and air folding and rolling over one another. There should be darkness deep inside them, but also sudden passages of cold grey light that reveal their scale.

That is something I’ve struggled with.

The clouds have fought me.

I’ve painted them, changed them, softened them, darkened them and, at one point, started much of them again. They became too blue. Then too uniform. Then too busy.

For a while they looked like storm clouds.

But they didn’t feel like a storm.

Going back to my reference made me realise that I had been concentrating too much on colour and not enough on light.

A storm isn’t alive because it is dark.

It is alive because of what happens inside the darkness.

There are areas so deep they seem almost impenetrable, sitting beside soft silvery greys where light finds its way through the enormous moving forms. Some edges are visible for a moment and then disappear completely into another bank of cloud.

That is what I need to capture now.

Not more detail.

More atmosphere. More depth. More movement. More threat.

And Beneath It, Stillness

While the sky becomes increasingly violent, I want the land beneath it to become quieter.

The veld doesn’t need to compete with the storm.

I imagine the grasses stretching away towards the horizon, subdued beneath the strange light.

Trees stand against the sky. Somewhere in that landscape there may be animals quietly carrying on with what they were doing before the weather changed.

They aren’t performing for the storm.

They are simply part of this place.

There is something deeply moving to me about that calmness beneath such an extraordinary sky.

Above them, the atmosphere is churning.

Beyond them, rain is pouring out of the clouds.

Yet down on the earth there is stillness.

I want you to feel that stillness because it makes the violence of the sky even more powerful.

The Rain

The rain may eventually become one of the most important parts of the painting.

I don’t want it to look like painted lines falling from a cloud.

I want it to feel dense.

I want to see a distant part of the bushveld slowly disappear behind it.

The rain should swallow colour and detail as it moves across the landscape. Trees should become less distinct. The horizon should soften.

Light should filter strangely through the falling water.

I want to create that peculiar sensation of watching rain fall somewhere else while standing completely dry.

For those few minutes, there is distance between you and the storm.

You can see what is coming.

You can hear what is coming.

You can almost smell it.

And you wait.

The Last Light

Then there is that extraordinary light beneath the clouds.

I love the sky as it is developing because that golden opening has become much more than a sunset.

For me, it is the last moment of warmth before the storm takes over.

The cloud presses down from above, the landscape darkens from below, and between them survives this narrow passage of brilliant yellow and orange.

I don’t want to lose it.

In fact, the darker and more powerful the storm becomes, the more important that light becomes.

It is the breath between the two.

Standing on the Stoep

There won’t be a farmhouse in the painting.

There won’t be a stoep.

But somehow I want you to know that it is there.

I want the foreground to give you somewhere to stand.

I want you to feel as though the canvas isn’t a picture hanging on a wall anymore, but an opening onto the bushveld — and for a moment you have stepped through it.

You are standing under the shelter of that old farmhouse.

The veld stretches away in front of you.

The animals are quiet.

The grasses barely move.

The clouds are turning and building above you.

Somewhere out there, rain is hammering down onto the distant bush.

You can hear it.

You can smell it.

And you know it is coming towards you.

That is the moment I am trying to paint.

Not the storm after it arrives.

Not the landscape after the rain.

The waiting.

That extraordinary few minutes when the world seems simultaneously peaceful and threatening; when everything below is quiet while everything above is in turmoil.

And perhaps that is why I’ve been unwilling to settle for clouds that are merely technically correct.

They have to carry the painting.

They have to make you feel the weight of the sky.

They have to make the golden light seem precious because you know it is about to disappear.

They have to make you hear rain that isn’t really there.

So from this point onwards, I’m going to judge every decision in this painting by one question:

Does it make me feel more like I’m standing on that stoep?

Because when this painting is finished, I don’t want someone to look at it and simply think:

What a beautiful storm.

I want them to stand in front of it for a little longer.

Long enough for the room around them to become quiet.

Long enough to feel the veld stretching out in front of them.

Long enough to imagine the smell of wet earth carried on the wind.

And perhaps, if I’ve managed to paint it well enough, long enough to hear the rain coming.