it's good for the walls

Now that our sunroom is finally done, I found a good spot for my work "100 ways to Taka-Tuka-Land". I like this work, but it's quite big, so I'm happy that there is now a wall big enough in the house for this piece!

like a rose

I finished the painting on the door I was working on. It's very difficult to take a nice picture of it. The colours get very bright but I hope you'll get an idea.... I'm very happy with it, also because we have lots of plants and flowers in that room. Some of you asked me if it's special paint and yes, it is. So if you want to try it for yourself, asked for glass-paint, I'm looking forward to your works!

in and out of windows

I few weeks ago Lela send me this beautiful card of a domestic triptych window. I absolutely love the colours and those flowers: hollyhock.
As you know we are renovating our sunroom. You can also enter this room from the hall and I thought that this door could also use somethng new.... The door has a big window but the glass isn't that pretty anymore. I didn't like the curtain anymore so I wanted to paint something on it and I remembered the card. So now I'm working on the window and I wonder what it's going to be like...

it's quite a slow disaster

In June I told you that we are renovating a part of the house: the sun room. It had to be finished in July and now it's......Yes, Sepember! And still it's not done. I'm not going to annoy you with boring stories about everything that has gone wrong and dealing with construction business. The bad thing is that I can't really concentrate on drawing when people are working in the house.  Last weekend we decided to start painting the walls ourselves, so that is the painting I do at the moment, haha! And if your wondering about the blue walls: they delivered the wrong colour and we're waiting for the correct ones. I feel like I'm in an aquarium!

going nuts

We have a walnut-tree in our garden and what a coincident: since my last post about autumn the walnuts have started to fall down! It's guite some work to collect them all and it takes a while before they're all fallen down. Then they have to dry and well.....  I give them away to family and friends, because I'm allergic to nuts (see my post where I tell 7 things about myself). And every year I put a table outside and sell them.  When you drive around here you can find people selling their fruits, vegetables and nuts.We live in this house for 4 years now and in all this time only two persons did'nt put the money in the money box I ask for the nuts. So most people are honest ;-)

tomato-girl

In May I introduced you to my red hot chili pepper-girl. I got inspired because I grow my own vegetables and I thought a sculpture in as always nice in the kitchen! Now the pepper-queen is no longer alone: I made a tomato-princess. She's a bit bigger, about 100 cm. Because of the bad weather this time no pictures of the sculpture in the garden. Both sculptures are standing in my kitchen, on the window sill.

from my window view part 3

This is the last part of photo's of my garden. This is what you see when you go past the little gate. The people who lived here before us, used this part of the garden as a dump for the materials they used to build the house and all kind of other trash. We had a lot of work to make our own small forest look nice again. I found a lot of roof tiles and this poor dog (which I painted and make look nice again) and I build this sculpture out of it. Now he his the gatekeeper of the forest!

And at the end of our garden we have this beautiful view:

from my window view part 2

We had a beautiful week here in the south of the Netherlands, very sunny and hot and only a bit of rain yesterday. So this is the perfect opportunity to post the second part of the garden, as I promised. On the next picture you can see the spot where my rabbit Pollock lives, I guess he was inside his cage when I took the picture.

In part 3 I'll take you behind this small gate...

from my window view

And now for something completely different (to speak with Monty Pyhton, I watched some of their sketches this weekend), these are some pictures of my garden. I think Mano asked me already 2 or 3 times to post some pictures of it, so here they are! Because the garden is so big, if I start walking it goes down for 150 to 200 meters, I'll post the first pictuers today and next week the second part and I guess there will be a part three as well!

red hot chili pepper-girl

The season of growing your own vegetables has began! I grow my own tomato's, peppers, cucumbers, salad, strawberry's, rhubarb, herbs and hot chili's peppers. I still have a lot of peppers left from last year. They're hanging in my kitchen, I dry them. And we just finished the last tomato's from last year. So I made a sculpture for in the kitchen, the chili's need a queen! She's about 75 cm and I used one of my old barbie dolls. Now I'm working on a tomato-girl.

lazy crazy dreaming

It was such a beautiful, sunny weekend! I live in the south of the Netherlands and it was over 20 degrees over here. It's great to be outside at the moment, it's starting to get green everywere. It will probably rain again tomorrow so I'm going to enjoy the sun today!

something different

This is going to be a weird post about my toilet, haha! I thought it could use something fun to look at. We have a small mirror hanging on the wall, so I took the mirror and made a bird out of it. I made the bird out of pur foam, it's a great material but not easy to control. I had fun making it and the toilet looks also better I quess ;-)

know a colour

These are the ink bottles of Winsor & Newton and I just really like them. I don't draw a lot with ink but the few bottles I have of them are standing on my desk, most of the time just to look at. It's the drawings on the bottles I love: each colour has a different drawing. Some of them are beautiful and others I think are funny. Winsor & Newton has 26 drawing inkt colours and one day I would like to have all bottles! Not really to use, but then I have all the drawings for inspiration!

And the boxes the bottles are in are just as nice.

what is learnt early...

I found this picture of me drawing at the working table of my dad. I think I'm 3 or 4 years old. My father is a graphic designer who used to work a lot at home in his studio. I look very concentrated...
Oh, and my painting is almost done!

in a world of puppets

In the last publication of the magazine FLOW, there was an artikel about Karen Saaman. She is the owner of Popjes Art and she gets inspired by vintage dolls of the sixties, on her website and shop you can find the dolls, but also cards and buttons. The magazine printed a picture of an old vintage cabinet where she had put het dolls and figures in. And I remembered that I have the same kind of cabinet on the attic! This is a great idea to put all my old puppets in my room again. I had them now all in different boxes and somethimes I would look at them. This kind of stuff makes me happy!
On the small picture below  you can see the whole cabinet, as you can see I still have some room left!

stairway to....bed?

In the house we live there are really small stairs that go to the second floor, where my studio and the bedrooms are. It's not a space where you can do much: to small for paintings and to high to hang something beautiful. So about a year ago we thought we make some kind of artwork in it. We found a nice branch to hang all kind of stuff in it. Old works of me and my dad got a new purpose! My dad even "destroyed" some of his old drawings to make a new work as a background for the branch. We put some lights in it which makes is look a little bit like christmas, perfect for this time of the year! (but it also looks great in the summer!)
In the picture below you can see how the stairs go up, to put all of this in perspective...

dutch winter wonder land

First of all: I love snow! And here in the Netherlands we don`t have a lot of it. Wenn I was young, we used to have winters with a lot of snow, the way a winter should be. For the last 3 or 4 years the winters become colder again and this year it's snowing since the end of november. ( I hear all the people from Scandinavia or Canada laugh...) All there is in the news is the weather and the snow and the ice. The traffic is a disaster, no trains, plains or automobiles! The dutch don't know how to handle snow anymore!
Anyway, I was in our garden today to take pictures of the beautiful landscape we have here in the south. The first photo is the view you have if you sit on the seat in the second picture, which is a part of our garden. And then of course my rabbit Pollock, he doesn't seem to mind the snow!

artist's secret

Here's a little secret about how I create the backgrounds in my paintings: I use these old-fashioned, white curtains as a stencil. (look at the background of the painting in the post below). Meanwhile I have a big collection of curtains. Everytime I'm at a market I see if I can find some more....it's like a addiction.
And two days ago I thought that my curtains in the kitchen are realy boring and that I should change them. So why not some of my old-fashioned curtains? I airbrushed them to change the colour, some red and purple for christmas and in the spring I paint some curtains green en yellow!

one more or one less

My paintings are slowly taking over my home! The last paintings I did are now in the quest-room, so if someone wants to sleep over I first have to move my work...