Maggie Laubser's Forever Light

NICK VAN DER LEEK’S journey into what drove this great South African artist starts in anxious disquiet but ends filled with tranquillity and hope.

- Nick Van Der Leek’s

Fires are burning in Plettenberg Bay and Paarl. It seems to get hotter and drier the further south I go. I’m eight kilometres on the wrong side of Beaufort West when I pass a sign that says Nagenoeg (Close Enough). Am I? I have a bad feeling about this.

It’s the wrong time of year to be visiting Bloublommetjieskloof near Malmesbury. The productive wheat farm where Maria Magdalena Laubser was born in 1886, eight years before Irma Stern, is the right place but the wrong time. Now is neither planting or harvesting season. Under the burning South African sun in January, the Swartland is precisely that. Brown and swart — not the vivid swirl of Laubser's plantation paradise.

Despite mercury heatwaves belly dancing on the N1, I press on. Not far from the farm that first kindled Laubser's artistic juices is another farm, Oormanspost near Klipheuwel. After a whirlwind tour of Europe in her late twenties and thirties, a tour that incidentally included World War I, Oormanspost was what Laubser returned to.

I turn down the window to let in fresh air. Hot billowing pillows press into the capsule. Imagine travelling to Europe in October 1913 only to have World War I rain on your parade nine months later in July 1914. Most people would turn tail and head home, right? Not Laubser. Despite four years of hell involving the mobilisation of 70 million military personnel (mostly in Europe), as well as ten million dead and a similar amount wounded, Maggie Laubser, the plaasmeisie (farm girl) from Malmesbury, stuck it out, pursuing art instead of war.

During her eleven years abroad, Maggie planted herself in the various European art schools, including Slade School of Fine Art in London, and the Laren studio in Holland where Vincent van Gogh also learnt his trade.