The Farmer as Artist

Even the wisest philosophers have never found a name for it: that irresistible longing to step into a painting and make a home inside its world. At times I have to fight the urge. Show me one of Paul Gauguin’s canvases, ablaze with impossible, dazzling colours and scented with the languid tropical air of Tahiti, and I want to climb through the frame. To pluck a ripe mango between the brushstrokes and walk barefoot along an endless beach of burnished gold.

One of David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings can make me kick off my shoes on the coldest winter’s day, ready to dive into that crystal water, slipping through those precise geometric lines into the depths of sapphire blue.

It is a yearning born of dreams. Yet, every so often, dreams find a way of becoming real to the point of tactile. And we have people who are seldom compared to artists to thank for this: the farmer.

For what else could the landscape between Caledon and Napier in the Overberg be but a work of art? The winter wheat stands verdant and lush, a luxuriant emerald sea stretching to the horizon, its untamed expanse interrupted only by gentle hills rising from the earth in graceful curves.

Beside the wheat lie fields of canola, blazing in the brightest yellow imaginable, thousands upon thousands of blooms glittering like stars that have drifted down from a Chinese night sky. Above these broad swathes of butter-yellow flowers and the undulating carpet of green wheat arches an endless blue sky, vast and silent.

I find myself wondering who could ever paint such perfection, capturing the precise moment when earth, light and growing things come together before my eyes. But no answer is needed. You have seen it as it is, and in that instant the vision belongs to you alone.

Winter also casts its own revealing light on the quiet wonders wrought by the winegrower. At Diemersdal in Durbanville, the vines stand bare, their spirit at rest as they gather strength for the awakening of spring. Their shoots have been pruned with purpose so that the coming bunches will set true, and the vineyard rows are etched across the lush green cover crop with almost military precision. Beneath each vine, the grey-brown earth beckons — fragments of rock broken apart hundreds of millions of years ago, now cradling the roots that are the lifeblood of the vine.

Watch as a veil of silver cloud settles above the neatly pruned vineyards in the late afternoon. The sinking western sun spills strokes of orange and crimson across the landscape. What the farmer has created here surpasses art itself.

Farther north, beyond the Piekenierskloof Pass, the valley of Citrusdal bursts into colour as orange trees proudly display their brilliant fruit. The trees are sturdy, crowned with generous domes of foliage as green as an Irish dream. The saffron-hued oranges bring light and joy to the landscape, so much so that even the unforgiving rock faces of the surrounding mountains seem to gaze down with a smile.

Perhaps farmers live inside these paintings every day. Perhaps that is why they do what they do. But every time I return, I find myself appreciating them anew: the creators of nature’s greatest masterpieces.