Happy New Year!

Whether you live in a country where market booths look like this

or like this...

I want to wish you a very
creative
prosperous
healthy
and
overall happy

New Year
!!!

Circle of Art

This time I remembered to take some digital collages with me before leaving the Caribbean.

Making art, be it with fabric, paper or digital, has to wait until I am home again.

However, I am enjoying the beauty that is around me, as always, and this change of places feeds my creativity.

Despite the winter weather and the cold I make my daily walks. I look at my country with the eyes of a stranger, not a complete stranger of course, but yet a fresh look. All the luxury that I have come to live without or to a less extend (which is not bad at all!) amazes me. The roads and highways that are in a perfect condition, without the many potholes that we have to deal with on our island. The really crazy amount of brands you see in the supermarket and pharmacies. I mean, who is asking for hundreds of different bottles of shampoo and other hair products, who really needs all this excess? The same goes for the fashion shops in whichever town you are. While there is a big sale going on to get rid of the surplus of clothes, the new (winter!) fashion is hanging in the shops already. Do they really expect us to buy a complete wardrobe for the few winter months that are ahead of us? When seeing all this, I get a feeling, not for the first time, that I don't belong here anymore. For me the effect is that I refuse to buy anything!

So I stick to some art material and fabrics this time.

Don't think that these musings make me feel sad, for that is not the truth. It's just that I get a feeling of 'letting it go', which I assume, is not bad at all...

Inspiration from the Netherlands

a visit to a very cozy, simple tapas restaurant

even this can bring me to a very inspired state of mind

this was a fantastic mural inside the restaurant. I hope to lighten it up as soon as I am home again.

Untill then we enjoy Holland, our family, children, the shopping possibilities, the countryside
and each other.

I hope you enjoy your holidays too!

Snow and rain...

No bikes in this weather...

Do we really need to go out today?

'Moi' in the rain in Zevenaar (Holland) this morning

Wishing you all

a wonderful time,

together with family and friends,

wherever you may be

from a very snowful and wintery Holland:

Merry X-mas!

On cruiseships and inspiration

Today was the second time the Oasis of the Seas docked on our island.

Last week I was too late to take pictures, but here it is, seen from our boardwalk in Philipsburg. If you click you can get an idea of the size, the cruiseship to its left is already a big one...

Lots of tourists walking in Philipsburg's streets and alleys, so I quickly left after having made the picture

this is one of my favorite photographs, taken from a book on safari!

Everytime I come across it in my digital archive I feel happy and inspired, so I thought why not share it with you today?

This afternoon we leave for a trip to Curacao and we will travel on to Holland from there in the weekend. Though I hate to leave my studio behind, I am sure there will be some eyecandy and maybe art for me in the winter over there!

Thanks for visiting.

From the coffeeshop (1)

Coffeeshop collage 1

During last year's USA-trip we frequented the S-coffeeshops,

you know, not the Dutch/Amsterdam kind of coffee shops, but the ones where one might get

addicted to Frappucino! Just saying S should be enough for most of you to know what I am talking about, without adding to their PR.

What I love in all these places, beside the coffee of course, are the wallpapers, the little pieces of art that are always there, and are always different. I never saw the same thing twice!

So wherever we drank our morning coffee I shot pictures, lots of pictures.

I was so happy to finally find some art( sy expressions)!

It is fun to combine these pictures with whatever I have on photographs in my archive.

Today's digital collage is one of the results of this new series.

Sunday collage

Today a digital collage that I have not posted yet, though it has been sitting in my archive for a while

Pictures made in Washington last summer on July 4. If you click you can see the decoration on the veranda of a tourist office building somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula, combined with a license plate and a field of Canola

Washington 09

Working on this (4)

Detail of my experiment of earlier this week,

right as it is now, after some layers of acrylic paint

Oh boy!

I told you it would totally change and

it is not finished yet

By the way: I almost missed the Oasis of the Seas, due to an extended visit to the hairdresser. Was able to photograph it when the ship left the harbour and as the sun had already set, the results are bad. Next week Wednesday there will be another chance, but of course there is only one maiden trip, alas! For what I could see in the pinkish dusk the ship looked ugly, and of course huge

But I like my highlights :) !

Excitement on SXM

Because today world's biggest cruiseship, Oasis of the Seas,

will visit our island on its maiden trip

A huge jetty has been built to accomodate it, you can see the spot on the

first picture. If you click you also can see Fort Amsterdam about which

I've written some posts ago (the green 'peninsula' to the centre right)

Great Bay at sunset yesterday.

From this lovely place I will have a toast tonight at sunset on this floating city.

Though personnaly not a lover of things so huge, I do hope that lots of people enjoy their trip and that our island will profit from its weekly visits...

Working on this (3)

the view from our veranda this morning,

cats and dogs

so I sip my ice coffee and

continue quilting
...

Working on this (2)

Quilting, quilting...

Working on this (1)

This time I have a plan, more or less :)

it is only the beginning and may look totally
different when it's finished
so stay tuned...

Black and white!

Yesterday one of my rare artfriends on the island came to visit me. We talked and talked, about life, about family and of course about art. Besides being a gifted painter she is making the most wonderful reconstruction art. Like me she loves to use all kind of materials that had a life before and recycle them into new works of art. We also have in common that we work in a spontaneous, intuitive way, being inspired by what we see and feel for a great part. We had a wonderful time together!

As our discussion about art is still lingering on with me this morning , I am also contemplating on the week that is almost over.

For me it has been a productive week, on various levels. I have started making collages again, you can see them in my latest posts. Have been sewing clothes, finished art quilts and only have to put on the sleeves.

What has all this hopscotch of topics have in common, you wonder?

Well, to revert to the title of this post: they are in black and white.

Though I am a truly colourful person (or so they say...)

I sometimes just crave B & W!

So as a tribute to black and white and to close this post in style

I chose these pictures

chalkboards are an alltime favorite, oh, and tapas, of course (what about some black olives, mmm?)

this painting can be seen on the backside of a restroombuilding (!) on one of the island's favorite beaches. Did I mention before that art is not a priority on SXM?

Lichen on some huge boulders that you pass when walking to
Guana Bay (another beautiful beach for walking, too wild and dangerous to swim)

detail of an old wall of a building at Fort Amsterdam

that I intend to visit again this weekend

detail of wallpaper in a shopwindow in Vancouver last summer

Ah, the joy of being an artist, always finding treasures and beauty, wherever you look and wherever you are!

Enjoy your weekend...

On my way home

Yesterday I had some Xmas-shopping to do, so I went to Marigot

on the French side of the island

And because I ended up in a traffic jam I shot some pictures, here they are, SOOC, to get a glimpse of our Caribbean island, right now!

my eye fell on the sign in the middle of the picture, please read to click.

Hey, it's French here!
some window shopping... Look, all rasta stuff is on sale!

to get from one side to the other side of the island, one has to go 'over the hill'
There is always a beautiful Caribbean Sea
and yesterday the view was dramatic, it felt as a special gift to me

at the end of the mountain, after the roundabout and the sea I turned left and this busy, crowded panorama was visible. I hope you enjoyed this photo tour from Marigot to my home,

'Over the hill'

Black and White 2

'Au bout du monde'

Don't know why these words, but I liked them and had fun!

Black and White 1

Today I started clearing my worktable, browsed through some old magazines and

(yes, once again, it often happens this way)

I got inspired and decided quite spontaneously to make some collages.

Like the ones I made earlier this year, I hardly thought about anything, just chose to make them in black and white because that feels right at the moment. Obviously no or hardly any planning here :) Though I sometimes work in a more or less structured manner, even practise mindmapping every now and then, but not for this small works.

So my process is in short: browse, rip and glue!

After a week of not being allowed to work with my hands because of a bruised finger with stitches, it felt so good to finally make some art again, albeit just these quickies...

Friday collage

What is Left

digital collage

Getting Arboreal - A nature collection- November Issue...

It was time again to pay a visit to my tree. My first contribution to this collaboration came already late, and so is this one (sorry Julie!) . And since the tree itself looks the same to me, no fall, no color changes here in the tropics, I show some photographs of its surroundings.

The hill in the picture above is Sentry Hill, it is part of a range that runs from North to South on the island. I live somewhere to the right, next to where the slope begins. In the pretty dense forest live animals like mongoose and yes, monkeys! They sometimes visit our mango trees, but I digress...

This 'staketsel' (sorry, this is Dutch) is located in the park and opposite of 'my' tree.

It serves, I guess, no other purpose than being decorative

And here it is, seen from the other side as last time.
The park is being used a lot by islanders who have something to celebrate; every weekend there is some kind of BBQ, children party or meeting of an organisation and in the weekday afternoons I sometimes see children playing golf with their coaches!

I don't know what tree it is, it bears edible little apples in February and you can see them already in this picture if you click

some other hilltops from the range I mentioned, seen from under my little-apple-tree.

There is a big discussion going on since a few years concerning this area, because developers want to build houses here. Fortunately the people of Sint Maarten for once are resisting this!
We should be very careful with what is left on places like this.
Already too much of our beaches, coast and other pristine parts of the island has been sacrified for the big money

Do you want to see more special trees, and read stories that go with them from all over the world? Then hop over to The Land of Lost Luggage, participants are on the left.
Thanks for visiting!

And so it happened

... that this little piece of fabric turned from what it was here to this blueish result!

As I wrote on Saturday, I worked without planning, as I often do. It sometimes happens when I am in my studio, listening to e.g. a French chanson or classical music, that I am completely caught by it, by the text or whatever about it, and I simply have to start 'something', do you recognize this urge to create? Caused by the beauty of something, in this case music?

Back to this work above, I have to say that I already learned a lot of the mistakes made. I knew before that the use of acrylic would make the fabric stiff, which I considered no problem as it is not a household piece plus it was only a try-out! Yet at some moment during the process of painting, in between the several layers, I considered it worth finishing with a binding, so I did, which led to the first mistake (I expected it to be a process of trial and error...)

1. I should have put the binding on before painting, bc though I had squared the work it is slightly wavy now. Probably caused by ironing the binding on the back.

2. the acrylic paint has also made the fabrics look dull, which I don't like either. A solution to this could be adding medium to the paint.

What I love however, is the quilting pattern that is being highlighted by painting, the places that are recessed show different colours than the top, which gives a beautiful layered effect. It is clearly visible in the first picture (please ignore the difference in color of both photographs, since the first one is made inside and the other one in daylight on my veranda).

In the first picture you can also see that I added some bronze paint by stamping with one of my favorite found objects (I found it at one of our beaches and it is a weathered old buoy of a sailingship I guess, and has hardened out and burst into a circular pattern).

All in all I found this first experiment in sewing, quilting and then painting worth to be continued. What I will try next is using textile paint, or maybe even thickened dye. We'll see!

But it was fun to do, and for me this is maybe the most important part. It gives freedom to enjoy the process and not having to worry about the outcome.

Sewing machine, fabrics and paint!

It is Saturdaynight, we have a little break in our tv-programm

and I am suddenly encouraged to give it a try:

Why not?

Let me first tell how it started...

Whenever I need some inspiration, I surf the internet, like I know lots of artists do. And when I came across the website of Deirdre Adams some months ago, I felt a pang (isn't this the way it is said in English?). I mean that feeling of: thís could be the solution of my problem (no or way too expensive stretched canvases on our island), not being able nor willing to choose between fabrics and paint, and thus combining the two, having a deep desire to deepen my skills, to try something new. So I took the plunge...

Took out my scraps, not worrying about a color combination, nor about design principles, not yet. Worked frantically and without hesitation: it was just exploring the possibilities. Sewed fabrics together in a random way, continuously reminding myself of the fact that 'it is only a try-out'. Quilted it by machine

before the first layer of diluted acrylic paint

and after drying, a second session with Peynes Gray and Burnt Sienna.
It will take a lot of practising, of trial and error, before I will get some acceptable results, but this is fun to do, and exciting also!

More in a future post, so stay tuned...

Old stairs leading to...(continued)

(images are clickable)

In this post I promised to come back to the interior of this old building

that is located on the premises of Fort Amsterdam.

So I went up the few steps of the stairs, curious about what to find next...

looking to the left in the doorway

and to the right...

my interest was there, definitely, so I looked up, oh my,
look at that color, that lovely disintegration and decay!

Old rafters under the disintegrated roof.

Can you feel with me my happiness, when I found this 'jewel' on my island?

So close to my home, so quiet and abandoned, so accessible?

Just because...

the sun is back on the island, after some very grey and rainy days

this:

Sunny 78

digital collage

Old stairs leading to...

mortar plastered over age old stones...

leading us to this jewel on the island of St. Maarten,
more about it tomorrow...