LP 004 Snoek Braai

Snoek Braai is an original acrylic painting from my Limited Palette Series—a growing collection of small, individually numbered artworks created using black, white and just a handful of carefully chosen colours.

Some paintings begin with a place. This one began with a memory I didn't realise I still carried.

As I painted this weathered West Coast cottage, I found myself drawn to its sun-bleached palette. Whitewashed walls, faded turquoise woodwork, hardy coastal shrubs and dusty guinea fowl scratching in the yard. Everything blurred by salt, wind and the relentless summer sun.

Then came the smell.

Behind the cottage, snoek basted with apricot jam cooks slowly over the coals, sweet, sticky glaze bubbling over onto the foil tray beneath. A black potjie of mussels steaming away.  Fresh bread and braaibroodjies appearing while everyone waits, famished after a long day at the beach. Sunburnt faces. Salt-stiff hair. Legs sandblasted by the afternoon south easter. The kind of hunger that only sea air seems to create, and the certainty that whatever's on the braai will taste better than anything else you'd eaten all year.

For many South Africans, that's the smell of a West Coast summer.

Like every work in the Limited Palette Series, this painting forms part of an ongoing visual diary—small observations, moments of curiosity and quiet discoveries that emerge through the process of painting.

Original acrylic on hardboard
Professionally framed in solid kiaat
Individually numbered as part of the Limited Palette Series
Ready to hang