Vaal River
— — the slow brown water the highveld leaves behind.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest tributary of the Orange, running more than a thousand kilometres across the high interior of South Africa. The name comes from the Afrikaans word for dull or pale — the colour the river takes on as it carries the silt of the highveld down toward the Karoo. Weekend cottages line the banks below the Vaal Dam, and the river forms the working border between four provinces. The water moves slowly. The sky over it is enormous. — from the studio
Vaal River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Vaal River rises near Breyten in Mpumalanga, on the eastern edge of the highveld escarpment, and runs roughly 1,120 kilometres west and southwest to join the Orange River near Douglas in the Northern Cape. It is the Orange's largest tributary and the principal water source for Gauteng and the industrial heart of South Africa. Along its course the river forms much of the border between four provinces — Free State on the south bank, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and North West on the north — and drains a catchment of close to 200,000 square kilometres.
The name Vaal is Afrikaans for dull or pale, after the grey-brown silt the river carries off the highveld. The Vaal Dam, completed in 1938 and impounding the river about 77 kilometres south of Johannesburg, holds roughly 2,600 million cubic metres at full supply and supplies water to the bulk of Gauteng through the Rand Water system. Below the dam the river broadens into a flatwater corridor lined with reed beds and weekend cottages; above it the river runs cleaner and shallower over a long series of rocky riffles.
The river's highest flows usually come in late summer, from January through March, when the highveld thunderstorms push water down off the plateau and the Vaal Dam often opens its sluice gates. Winter runs cool, clear, and low, with frosts on the south-bank Free State side and yellowfish anglers working the rocky stretches above the dam. Diamond rushes along the river in the 1860s, particularly around Hopetown and Kimberley, were the opening act of the South African mining economy and still draw small-scale prospectors to the lower reaches.