The Line of Beauty

I arrived home on Friday in the dark after a 5 hour drive home owing to delays caused by big veld fires alongside the N1 motorway. The white walls around the property reminded me of somebody’s teeth that was smiling in the dark. They were a brilliant white glow in the dark.

The Line of Beauty

As I got out of the Bakkie I could smell the familiar smell of whitewash (limewash) and a lot of happy memories came back to me. I remembered my grandmother’s whitewashed thatched cottage next to the leivoor (irrigation furrow) in Barrydale. The clean savour of the freshly whitewashed house mixed with the fragrance of ripe apricots in the orchard near the kitchen.

Before Christmas the house and ‘werfmure’ (boundary walls) would be whitewashed giving the house the look of a ‘marzipan cottage’. All these smells bring back happy and nostalgic memories of my childhood. That was the familiar bouquet that greeted me as I stepped out of the bakkie on Friday night and although I was very tired it still evoked a happy contentment.

Going down the steps of the parking terrace I looked to the right, down the path that stretches past the orchard to where the boundary wall was shining brilliantly white in the dark. The line of beauty between the two pillars creates a liveliness and relief in the otherwise straight wall. The serpentine line in the wall is accentuated by the plaster capping formed by a master craftsman.

The detail in the plasterwork was all made by hand and looking at it now I am glad that we did not consider using prefabricated capping on the pillars. Watching the builder’s craftsman-father sculpt the plaster detail on the walls and pillars was a privilege. The reconstructed walls are real works of art.  Authenticity of detail adds that visual simplicity that lifts the architecture of these beautiful old buildings.

I have to agree with William Hogarth’s (18^th century English painter, satirist and writer) theory of aesthetics that the S-shaped curved line excites the attention of the viewer.