Today I have hung up my new painting in a new exhibition with art from Swedish nature. The pictures are made with soft pastel or watercolour. The opening is on Saturday. The works of art below are from Gysinge at the Dal River (Dalalven).
The weather here in Sweden has been fantastic - clear blue early spring skies with not a drop of water from above. Frost in the grass in the mornings, and then up to 8 degrees C (about 14 degrees F or so). Yesterday we went to the small coastal town of Skarhamn, which is home to the Nordic Watercolor Museum, built right on the sea.
The deck on the outside of the museum is gorgeous, and no railing anywhere. This is not an American place. If kids fall in the water, then it is the kids and the parents fault for not taking care, not the museum's fault. I think that is very sensible... People should be responsible for their actions (and their kids), and not blame 'the devil and his aunt' (that is a Swedish expression, quite good, it means you blame anybody else but you).
The rocks here are of warm pink granite, shaped by the ice age into round forms. Lichens are everywhere and of many shapes and colors.
You can rent these studios to live and paint in, as a little art colony.
The sea water is incredibly clear - this is looking down from the deck straight into the water. The white is the sunlight on the water surface.
I have just returned from a lecture about how to best manage the flood of e-mails, spam, semi-spam, and non-spam that is inundating our inboxes (more about this in another blog post), but as a result of this I think I will start adding interesting things here on the blog instead of sending so many links via e-mail to my friends and family. Don't worry, you (family and close friends) will still get the personalized stuff, but not the 'hey, look at this cool thing I found" in your inboxes. It will be here instead as 'bits and pieces of life', so you can look at it whenever you feel you have time, and also so the rest of you blog readers can see it.
So, here is today's Bits and Pieces:
I love WPA (Works Progress Administration) posters, made in USA by Roosevelt's Depression Job-making programs in the 1930s. Here is one promoting travel to Montana and another for an art exhibit in Chicago. Clean lines, shapes and even colors, little text, but the message is clear. Today so much advertising and information is drowned in messy unimportant things (like too long, verbally winding emails with a hidden message somewhere, but where?). You can see more WPA posters here.
Britt Irick is continuing to make amazing illustrations, see them on his blog. I love the one of the dinosaur with leafy, homemade wings.
Things I have learned recently: More than half of American meteorologists do not think that global warming exist. An island that has been the source of border debates between India and Pakistan for a long time has ceased to exist. It sank into the sea. The Amazon river basin is as wide as The United States and only 4 million people live there. It takes an amazing amount of water to make half a kilo of sausage (this includes the total water needs for growing the foods for the animals, treating the waste from the animals, etc.) - see most recent issue of National Geographic Magazine. And 20% of all fresh water is in the Amazon.
Tomorrow is April 1st and the day before Good Friday. In Sweden young children will dress up as witches with brooms, coffee pots, and cats (at least sometimes), and go from house to house and beg for candy. This is not a joke.
Some gorgeous things: nice candles on etsy.com, the Design Observer's Today images are never boring (even some Swedish ballet in this one) , flowering crocuses in our yard, and a planned summer trip to Colorado...
And the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden was gorgeous and at the same time too much orchids.... a fantastic example of how you can have too much of a good thing, just like perfume, ice cream, and jewelry around your neck. But I bet most people love it. I just think that sometimes you see beauty more if you have to look close and think about it, instead of having it stuffed into your face repeatedly. Orchids are gorgeous after all... (Dear NYBG web designers [if you read this], if you had some nice permanent web pages about the show with readable normal-sized text, interesting links, and additional photos I would have loved to link to them, but since that is lacking... sorry).
I found this Dor Beetle under some pines this summer. It was searching for cow dung and will dig shafts below it and bury the dung for breeding. It is also called the Lousy Watchman because it is commonly heavily infested with mites. This is a watercolor of mine.
Yesterday, NASA reported that they have the first solid evidence for ice (from water) on the moon. Now we know there is water on both Mars and the moon, soon I think we will hear there are little bacteria-life things living there too. DNA can survive space and be transported from a planet to another through asteroids, so why not - life on other planets than Earth is quite likely I think. The first life on Earth wasn't living in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, it survived in what we think are hellish environments - boiling acid mudpots, deep-sea hot vents, methane gas filled environments, and other places of what we now think are extreme environments because we are used to the extreme oxygen-rich environment we live in. But it appears that early life on Earth at least was dependent on water. This is all very exciting - congratulations NASA!
The stamp of the day are ice crystals (snow flakes) on Swedish stamps.
Mom (AnS) landed in a snowstorm and had to suffer through 95 degree heat yesterday (36 grader Celsius) in New Jersey, so now she knows what American weather means. She has been busy with her binoculars and her paint brush, and here are some examples. During her trip to NJ we went from the beginning of spring to summer in just three weeks, while many climate records were broken. The lilac, oaks, and forsythias are all flowering at the same time now. The birds are going crazy too, and arriving in large flocks. I wish the birds ate the deers....
'Skiren', a small lake in the forest.
'The Owl ridge' in springtime.
A Blackbird drinking rainwater.
A boulder in 'Hedmossen' (The heather bog).
Hayfield in the mountains.
My apple trees and flowers.
Shadows on the road.
A newspaper-reading man at my swimming place.
A 'bluetite' bird among apple flowers.
This is the old house Gäserudstugan [the Gäserud house] where we who write in this blog have our forefather from. This house can you visit in Dals-Ed, Dalsland, in Sweden. It is built 1741 after dendrocronologic examination. It was an older house on the same place, but it was bad so that when Per Persson got the house from his father and married Ingrid Jonsdotter he build this house. This is a watercolor painting I did of it when I was there.
This is the interior from the kitchen. This house was inhabited until 1931, then a new house was built a little bit away from this house. If you want to know more, search and google bagenholm-habol.org or "Gäserudstugan".
[LS edited some, and added title and labels]
I was over at the Swissmiss blog, and ran into Stina Persson, an artist in Stockholm. Check out her modern watercolors and other art. I love it! She seems to be heavily into marketing and design too, with clients like Target, Elle, and Blue Note Records.
