almost....

So I did not find that small door to escape which I drew in my last post. It has been busy, the gifst are wrapped, the cooking is almost done so I hope today I can draw a bit more and relax.
This is a picture I took of a nativity scene which is build every year across our street at a farm. There is a day-care at this farm for mental disabled kids and they made this figures. I really like them, especially the animals make me smile.

What I want to say to you all: I hope you have a very nice christmas together with people you love, some nice food and well...some presents! Wish you some wonderfull days!

circle of life

I few weeks ago I told you about my visit to the Gaia Zoo. Now I want to show you a beautiful sculpure they own. The artist Roger Geraerdts made it. About two years ago you could see the "Elephants Parade" in the city Heerlen. The Elephants Parade is the world's largest open air exhibition of decorated elephant statues that seeks to attract public awareness and support for Asian elephant conservation. As an artist you get a grey elephant statue and you can do with it as you like. The wonderful thing about this sculpture is that you really have to look twice and then you'll see what's going on...He build a lion out of wood and iron around the elephant. I just think it's great. And apparently more people thought that so the Zoo ordered a baby sculpture.

favourite girl

Meet my favourite almost-every-day-girl. I have to pass her when I deliver my mail (my job to earn some money) in a small village.  She stands in front of a house which used to be a gallery but now it's a bed and breakfast. She's the only one who is left and I don't now the artist. I like her. I like the long legs and her socks and her orange hair. Maybe it's because she reminds me of my drawings.

lovable lions

Last weekend we had some of the last beautiful, sunny days. Since then it's just rain, rain and some more rain. So we made a walk through Maastricht and visited the lions of Marjolein Mandersloot. She made these sculpures for a part of Maastricht that has been renewed and I just love them! They are made of cast iron but they look like stuffed animals and very cuddly. I wish you all a nice weekend, sunny or rainy: it really doesn't matter, just enjoy it!

the edge of May

The last two weeks we had a lot of rain over here. At the same time it was very warm so that are good conditions for plants to grow. Because it was so cold for a long time, there was not a lot of work in the garden, but now everything just exploded! So this weekend I have to work a little bit in our garden. Not to much, I like a wild garden, but I still want to see the funny schulpture and my strawberry-plants also need some space. And I have to sort out my drawings: which ones I will show in the exhibition. A busy weekend it will be, I hope you will enjoy yours too!

and winter comes

My little holiday is over and it was great. We went to a national park were you can make wonderful walks. And if you're lucky and it's very cold and snowy, you can sleigh and do some ice-skating. And in the week before we left, winter started over here! The weather was perfect, just very cold and the landscape beautiful. And because I love snow, I wanted to make something. Just to bad: the snow wouldn't stick. I couln't build I giant Pippi-snow-girl out of it. So I tried to make a polar bear coming out of the water, haha!

undiscovered places

Yesterday we made a trip to the cities "Weert" and "Roermond". They're only about 45 minutes away from where I live and I had never been there. People fly all over the world but they don't really know their own country. So sometimes I go to places that are nearby that I've never visited. In Weert we accidentally walked in a museum which turned out to be a religious museum with mostly old paintings and a lot silver and gold stuff. In a small room around the corner there was this sculpture made by Desire Tonnaer. It shows Maria Magdalena as a mummy in a way archaeologists could have found her. I find this sculpture fascinating and a bit scary and it was a absolute surprise in this museum.
The picture below I took in Roermond. This poor guy was standing in front of toyshop and covered in plastic because of the rain. I immediately fell in love with him! Those are the only two pictures I took the whole day...

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:

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.

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 ;-)

Pawel Althamer

Today I went to the Ludwig Forum in Aachen (Germany). It's a museum for modern art and they are now showing work of Pawel Althamer. He is a polish artist who won "The Aachen Art Prize". I really like his sculptures, but the exhibition was a bit disapointing. The museum is preparing for a big exhibition in march so a lot of ereas are closed. But Art Prize is a big thing and they have only three works of Althamer: the film "the golden knight" and the same-titled sculpture and a installation, which you could see in the neighbouring church.

The funny thing is, as I was studying in Basel (Switzerland) Pawel was a guest teacher at the academy in the year 2003. I remember that he didn`t say very much, but he told us that he thinks that walking is very important to watch and observe things, especially in the city. So he made us walk through Basel for three days! At day three the most students didn't even show up. He told us that he had organized a exhibition in "Stadtkino Basel" and we had to make sculptures out of clay, inspired by our walks. So the picture below shows the weird baby-thing I made in his workshop. The baby is holding a plastic bal with a dog inside. I don't know what I was thinking, but making sculptures isn't my calling, haha! I didn't speak a lot with Pawel, but the weird thing is that I remember his workshop and walking through the city.

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...

gingerbread-house

This year I made a gingerbread-house! As I finished it I thought by myself: the house needs an environment, it looks so empty and lonely. So  it became a big project! So now it has woods, and rabbits and all kind of figures and of course a bad witch inside the house! It ended up to be a lot of work, but it was fun to do.
I hope you all have a nice christmas and don`t eat to much of everything!

instantly more pretty

This sculpture used to be just a concrete, weird thing. It had the colour of a sick salmon. A friend of my mum gave it to her and after a couple of years I thought: this thing needs paint! And I saw all these figures in it. So I had two days of fun painting it and now it has a nice place in the house!
It's about 60 cm high and the photo below shows the entire sculpture.

poor princess in the snow

I found this concrete, garden sculpture between the leaves as we moved in this house. Very kitschy... So I made it a little bit more kitschy with a tattoo on her back to compleet the whole thing. She is standing there for almost three years now and at the moment she looks a bit cold. I wonder how long the paint is going to last...

the frog king in the snow

It's snowing for quite some days now and the Frog King does'nt look very happy... We bought this scuplture about a year ago at a market in Aachen (Germany). Unfortunatly I lost the adres of the maker of this beautiful sculpture. Now with the snow on his head I think he looks funny!