In the little town of Fauresmith in the southwestern Free State, where the railway line runs down the middle of the main road, Jacobus Silwer is hard at work at his drawing board, taking his ballpoint pen for a ride.

The line twists and turns, kruis en dwars, the scratches and cross-hatches and loops and whorls adding texture and shade to the scene of an empty Free State freeway, fringed by wild veld, stretching into the vanishing point on the horizon. The sign on the roadside reads: Fauresmith 50.

For Jacobus, who grew up in Pretoria, where the roads are a little busier, drawing with pen is a lot like life itself.

You can’t erase your mistakes, like you can with pencil; you have to draw over your mistakes, over and over, until the mistakes blend into the background and become part of the road you’re travelling.

“It’s like wrinkles,” says Jacobus. “Wrinkles are beautiful. They are your experience. You learn the most from the life that had the ugliest lines.”

Jacobus began sketching with pen to relieve the tedium of his job as a security guard in the heart of London’s financial district, while on a gap year after completing his Graphic Design diploma at Technikon Free State.

“All I had to pass the time in the service yard hut was a black ballpoint pen and a logbook,” he laughs.

As a child, he had always wanted to be a game ranger, but his flair with a pack of crayons drew him into the career that now occupies most of his time.

His evocative, richly detailed drawings cast fresh light and shade on the many subjects of his creative obsession: mighty baobabs, buffalo skulls, scarab beetles, thorn trees, proteas, Free State farmsteads, merino sheep, and pet dogs and family portraits on commission.

But the young Jacobus had a habit of singing while drawing, too, in a house that was always filled with music. He learned to play the piano and sang in the school choir.

“I always ended up singing some song for some old person at a party my family attended,” he recalls.

One day, his father handed him an old Hofner 12-string guitar and showed him how to play the opening chords of Ballad of the Green Berets: “Fighting soldiers from the sky…”

Jacobus taught himself to play the rest, his ear for a tune being as sure as his hand for a pen.

He busked in pubs and entered talent competitions, performing well at Bloemfontein Waterfront Idols, The Best of Bloem, and Bloemfontein’s Got Talent.

In 2012, came proof of his appeal beyond the boundaries of his home province. Invited to take part in the kykNET contest, Ons Soek Die Sanger, he earned a three-year recording contract with Select Music as part of the duo, Silwer en Goud.

Today, as a solo singer-songwriter, Jacobus is distinguished by his heartfelt baritone voice, his delicate piano-and-guitar arrangements, and the earthy poetry of his melodies about love, faith, and the land.

“Wys vir my ‘n wegkruipplek, wys my waar’s die son,” he sings, “dis donker in my siel, my hart, dis bitter op my tong”. Show me a hiding place, show me where’s the sun, it’s dark in my soul, my heart, it’s bitter on my tongue.

But the paradox of the artist is that his wegkruipplek, his place of solitude and retreat, is also the place where he opens himself up to the world.

“It’s almost like you get a personality when you learn to play the guitar,” he says. “Because you have a way to connect with people you were previously afraid of. It’s a way to communicate with people, to draw people closer to you. You’re going to be able to tell them the truth that you feel in your heart.”

Jacobus calls himself an “ambivert” — someone with a balance of introvert and extrovert characteristics — which would explain why he feels so much at home in Fauresmith, a little dorp with a lot of hart en siel.

“I’m terribly fond of this place,” he says. “I’m an out-and-out Free Stater.”

Together with his heart-and-soulmate, his wife, Lizzie, an accomplished artist and photographer, he wants other people to feel that way about Fauresmith too, to see it as a destination, rather than a dot on the map.

In the lounge of the old Phoenix Hotel, restored after it burned down many years ago, is a venue called the Karoohuis Teater.

It’s a cosy room with a Bohemian feel, lit by fairy lights and bedside lamps and flickering candles, and people come to sit on the dining table chairs and listen to guest singers from near and far.

Tannie Ina, who owns the hotel, and whose husband Willie is the local dominee, told Jacobus and Lizzie that they were welcome to use the venue if they wanted to “start something beautiful” in the dorp. That’s what they’ve done.

“It only costs us the electricity that we use for the night,” says Jacobus.

At the guest sessions once a month, Jacobus opens the evening with a few of his songs, and then Lizzy will say to the star of the night, listen, my husband can sing a little, can he sing one or two songs with you?

“Most of them say yes,” laughs Jacobus.

And then they take to the stage together, and their voices ring out into the night, all the way down Voortrekker Road, where the railway line runs through Fauresmith, catching the gleam of the stars.