Description
“ARTWORK STORY: Eike.
Another piece in the Karoo Huijs collection.
This one is an ode to the older sister that spread her leafy hands above to cover my green. I grew into womanhood in front of her. I watched her change her shade & spread her growth like a forgotten find all over the floor. Like the countless thoughts & dreams that passed, so her leaves lay after each season’s change. Spread like the pages of a journal written, that time, so many years ago.
She raised her damp, black hands up at the sky when the winter & the wet set in. A most gracious reminder of Where to reach, to Whom to look up to when the nakedness sets in.
It is in her aged shape, her textured arms, her pointy fingers, her graceful acceptance of change, that I found my soul to sprout time & again.
See, if there is one tree I identify most with it would be her. The elegant Eike.
It is her relent to the shedding of old growth, and making room for more, that I found our house to become a home.
It took me a long time to ease into the winter that set in so suddenly upon greeting this older sister in the known. To follow my love to the life we now own.
And what I find most incredible, outside my studio here in the Karoo, sits a tall oak tree looking down over me. A familiar face, our Faber place.
This tree, this branch, her response to the seasons is the embodiment of pilgrimage. Though tall, stationary, she has moved with me, she has lost with me, she has grown new.
And so too the marriage of the Karoo, and the Cape Dutch deep vein.
This, is a tree called home.”
