Exhibition Les jardins des Arts

A work of mine has been chosen for this exhibition on Saturday 27 September in Oegstgeest (The Netherlands). (The exhibition is garden-themed because it's National Gardeners Day.) I did a little happy dance of course. It's funny that I made an artists book especially for this occasion, with gelatine prints of things from the garden, but the judges didn't choose it. They chose a work from the last assessment for the Art Academy, the felted sticks.

OMG it's a bloke!

  

I've tried drawing a face with charcoal again. It's a face, that's okay. But the original is a photo of a woman! The various elements seem to resemble, but the overall picture isn't.

I have to keep practising a lot!

Etching

Making marks in an etching plate was the challenge for the second lesson in Graphics. It was remarkable easy. The acid bath did the hard work. Next time I try a serious drawing.

 

Quilt collage

Some time ago I felt the urge to make a collage without too much thinking. So I grabbed pieces that were lying nearby and sewed them together. But in the end there was, again, a story. In my head.

Stencil project

Kind of crazy stencilling on paper to make a folder for a friend. Afterwards I rubbed the paper with furniture polish.

Graphics course

This summer I started with a short course Graphics. It's meant to make me acquainted with all kinds of Graphic Arts, such as drypoint, etching and monoprinting (although I do that already, e.g. with a gelatine plate). Above is an example of dry needle etching in cardboard (actually a lid of a cardboard box containing drinking glasses) that I did the first lesson. It was fun to slightly alter each pass.

Lino cutting altered

I cut away most of the previous green coloured lino to make it more interesting.

Teaservice collage

A while back I made this cover for a friend's birthday. Inside are pages with High Tea recipes (done by me and other friends).

eco dyeing

 

I've been ecodyeing a bit lately. With eucalypt and poppy. I used the steaming method with some vinegar in the water and a piece of metal scouring pad in the steam basket. At first I tried it with pieces of cotton and flannel but it turned out that silk worked the best.

 

Here you see some bundles with the eucalypt leaves after they've been cooked for an hour.

And this is one of the silks after it has been left to dry (in the bundle) for 24 hours. I find it amazing that those greyish leaves can make such a bright orange colour. (The poppies give a very dark purple/aubergine colour.)

the last assessment

The photos are made at the art academy on the evening of the assessment. It was already dark, so the lighting isn't that great.

My projects were very diverse. I wanted to work with different materials and had some inspirational sentences and a photo to work with.
The jury gave me a 7+ (out of 10). They kind of liked it, but they missed the experiment, I think. (I don't know if it matters that they were painters.)

I call this 'the monks' because they are inspired by a photo of Tibetan monks sitting in semi circles. They have burgundy coloured cloaks and mustard yellow hats on. For the base I dyed flannel and made bags out of it, filled with grit. In the background you see an enlarged photo of leftover dye.

For this one I felted around sticks.

This is more collage work. It is called: (translated) Therefore I'm telling it to you now. A sentence I once overheard somebody saying while passing.

This is called: A crazy collection of my thoughts. It's a sentence from a song that stuck to me. I made the three frames and filled them with different things, representing the crazy, the light and the dark things that go around in my mind.

 

 This is a mobile, made of polystyrene circles and wooden (satay and tapas) sticks, secured to a small plank. It was inspired by the things I made for the first assessment in January. I wanted to do something with (semi)circles and overlapping.

 While I was painting hundreds of sticks I used magazine paper to protect my table. And guess what: the paper got stained so interestingly that I played some more with it and it resulted in these five small pieces.