The Botanicals

I love textured plants and I have begun work on a series of linocuts featuring created flora and fauna. Here…

The image shows an intricately designed miniature room of a dollhouse interior. It's set up as a cozy and cluttered living space, filled with books, furniture, and various decorative items. The overall impression is one of a well-loved and lived-in room, suggesting a comfortable and creative atmosphere. Walls: The walls are lined with tall bookshelves, filled with what appear to be miniature books. One wall is painted a bold blue color, contrasting with the warmer tones of the rest of the room. There's a collection of small framed pictures on the blue wall.

Bloomsbury House – my dolls house

For those of us who are artists – a dolls’ house combines many of the aforementioned aspects along with our ability to use our artistic skill-set to their fullest extent. It challenges us to create on a minute scale. To paint, print, etch, book-bind, micro-mosaic, clothe, decorate within the confines of a small space. My dolls’ house has become a vehicle for my artistic talents.  I have my own permanent gallery on display when and how I choose. I open the doors of my dolls’ house and I see my own reflection looking back in all its order and perfection – just as I would have it.

A vibrant mosaic artwork based on a Jacobean Embroidery design

Mosaic Mandalas: A Journey of Reflection

A vibrant mosaic artwork is centrally positioned within the frame, displaying an ornate floral design. The artwork is circular, with a border composed of small, dark gray, rectangular tiles. The central design features a large, stylized flower in shades of orange, red, and yellow, with a white center and detailed, petal-like structures. Surrounding the main flower are various botanical elements, including green leaves, blue berries, small yellow flowers, and a detailed insect that resembles a dragonfly or a bee. These elements are rendered in shades of green, yellow, and blue, creating a vibrant contrast against the dark background.

Shout-out to the makers of the Slip Strop

I have done some damage in the past to tools using traditional ‘slip stones’. Lino carving tools are so much finer and require a finer sharpening method. So recently in my search for a good sharpening system I came across the Slip Strop made by Flexcut (US made) which, they state, is ‘an easy way for creating and maintaining carving tool’s razor edge’. I bought the set on Amazon and it arrived a few days later.

1001 things to do with an IKEA place-mat

For many of you this scene will also represent a Dutch cliché i.e. a scene that, upon its inception, may have been striking but has become unoriginal through repetition and overuse. Popularity made scenes such as these seem trite, turning them into what we now call clichés. Whether you like the scene or not, the reality is, that this scene is alive and well in the Netherlands of today. Sure, more often than not you see large turbine driven windmills of the modern variety towering over these beautiful small old windmills, but despite that, in the foreground this scene can still be found in the Netherlands of 2019- thank goodness!

Why Draw Buildings?

Het antwoord is eenvoudig. In Nieuw Zeeland, het land waar ik vandaan kom, zie ik dagelijks een adembenemende natuur om mij heen. Die prachtige natuur dringt zich aan je op. Daar ontkomen beeldende kunstenaars ook niet aan. Elke dag biedt een nieuwe mogelijkheid om je in die wereld om je heen te verdiepen en die artistiek te interpreteren en vast te leggen. En zo dragen zij bij aan het scheppen en het weergeven van een belangrijk aspect van de culturele contekst van het land. Hier in Nederland ervaar ik een andere wereld om mij heen. Overal staan huizen en gebouwen. De architectuur levert een prachtig tijdsbeeld op….

Movement

I was also think its a real challenge to capture movement in motion. Not far from where I live is a skateboard pipe (I think that’s what they’re called). After school and on the weekends the area is teaming with young lads, in the main, trying their hand at all manner of motion devices with wheels of varying sizes and on gradients of varying degrees of treacherousness.

The Bong Tree is complete

I managed to get this far and only sliced my finger once – not bad going considering I have cut up kilos and kilos of marble.I’m original mosaicing tools in the form of a hammer and hardy. More on that in another blog. These tools are usually used for cutting glass and you only have to tap the glass with the hammer and it breaks perfectly. Cutting marble is another story. Sometimes the pieces I’m cutting are 10 centimeters thick and really require some serious force, needless to say the hammer gets blunt quickly.

Is there lead in Smalti?

This week a reader asked me this question- is there lead in smalti? Smalti is the glass used for making…

Mum and Me

I lost my mother many years ago to cancer. While recently on a cruise to Iceland I was sitting on…

The importance of drawing your design

Here are the results of my thought process:. As you can see I began playing with a variety of blues and gold and began to think about how I would create the lines in the design and whether or not I wanted a border and whether that border should be black.

Linocuts and Kunisada

While travelling round the Netherlands in 2017 I visited the Japan Museum SeiboldHuis in Leiden. At the time they had…

The Emergence of Pique Assiette

The literal translation of pique assiette from French is ‘thief of plates’ or ‘freeloader’.  Raymond Isidore (1900-1964) is perhaps best known as the king of pique assiette. His entire home is covered in bits of pottery he found in the fields around Chartre, France. His neighbors called him ‘pique assiette’ as a derogatory term and it has remained in use more generally today.