satisfying my inner ship geek

i've been in copenhagen for a few wonderful days. i was working with some of the most creative people in denmark and i get to keep doing so! what more could a girl ask? a little walk along the quayside at nordhavn. i encountered this rather rusty barge and remembered all the beauty of rusty metal. in all, a very wonderful few days. 

little skrot man

how awesome is this little assemblage that husband put together? it's for the creagive art exhibition this weekend. i've got another piece with my photo of the ship being scrapped to go with it. we make a pretty good team - i collect the pieces and lay them out and husband puts them all together. i insisted that the eyes be two different sizes, as i love the expression it gives. the hands are all him. and the one is flipping off because it fits with the theme of skrot (op) (scrap, in danish, but more loaded with meaning when you add the "up" bit).

it's been a pretty great week. husband i made art together. i've met lots of new people. i survived a public speaking engagement today and was very inspired by the other talks as well. it was a sort of TED-like conference, only even better speaker/topic quality (better than TEDx Copenhagen, anyway). tho' i did have moments, while i was listening to the other talks, of feeling i have simply not been doing enough with my life. it struck me, once again, that i do best when i get out and see and experience new things. it gets my ideas flowing. maybe i'm not really made for the quiet country life. tho' i am grateful to have it to return to when i've been out and about.

i think i feel that confidence i feared was gone slowly returning. and that's a very good thing.

spring exhibition - works in progress

our local art group's yearly exhibition is on the horizon. which means that we've stepped up the creativity around here. i'm putting together some rusty bits and pieces with driftwood, to fit the "skrot" (scrap) theme.

these are going to hang from something or other in a way that's still but a vague and blurry (partially due to my eyes being very affected by the birch pollen in air) picture in my mind.

i like that this one ended up having a kind of talisman feel.  it has slightly less rusty bits, but that's just the direction it went in.

tho' i'm still composing in my head, i know that the pressure of the deadline and an otherwise rather busy week will work together to make it happen. that's how it always is. i'm a girl in need of a deadline.

this old bottle of ink i got in a box of goodies at the autumn flea market a couple of years ago. rather fun to put it to use .

this broken pot is a piece that our drink & draw group worked on together on friday evening. the hostess of the last drink & draw dropped it and thought it would be a good idea to paint the shards and try to reassemble it. so that's precisely what we did.

i love how it turned out, even if it did take me 2 days to glue it together. we've got plans for it as well, involving some old shoes, a horse hoof with the shoe still one (the rest of the horse was long ago fed to the lions at a nearby zoo - that's how we roll in denmark, after all, we do like to keep our lions fed). due to all of us using the same inks, it harmonizes but bears the style of each of us. i like that. i'll be sure to share the final version once it's finished. i've passed it along to another from the group now.

skrot on the brain

skrot - it's a danish word for scrap, not something naughty, tho' it does look a bit naughty somehow. for me, it also has the connotation of being scrap metal, so it conjures images of fetching bits of rusty wire and iron. so i was very excited when our local art group, creagive (get that, we're creative in give) chose skrot as the theme for our yearly spring exhibition.

i didn't participate in last year's exhibition, as i felt like i really couldn't since i'm not a painter, but with this theme, it lends itself more to the mixed media/collage-style that i like. and with five days off here for easter, i'm getting down to business in earnest on the pieces i've been mulling over in my mind for several months. i got permission to go explore the container above (which i had sneaked a photo of a couple of weeks ago) and take what i'd like for the pieces i have but a vague picture of in my mind. alas, i went today to have a look and found, to my horror, that the container had been emptied. i'll be honest and tell you that i almost cried. i could picture one of my little fobots (found object robot) with curly hair made of those metal shavings and now that they're gone, i'm not sure what to do.

some members of the group were quite horrified by the theme, coming up with all kinds of violent and sexual connotations for the word (there is a meaning of it that's along the lines of up yours). but i say there's still potential to artistically explore those meanings as well, even tho' the word doesn't bring such things to my mind when i ponder it. perhaps i'm a little too in love with shipyards, as those are the images that come to mind for me - enormous, rusty bits of metal, lying around, looking fetching. i can see all kinds of potential in those. and i find myself also pondering ways of working some lego into my pieces - the contrast between the rusty metal and the colorful plastic could be very interesting.

in addition to a little grouping of fobots, i've also ordered this photo of a ship that's being scrapped in a large size. husband is going to help me make a frame that echos the scrap theme as well. i've found so much inspiration in the notion of rusty hunks of metal. i'm lucky there's no limit this year to how many pieces you can contribute. but we'll see how many of the ideas floating in my head and on my pinterest board, make it into reality and how they look when they do. inspiration is a wonderful thing.

scrapped

is it weird to be a little bit in love with a ship that's being scrapped?

it also reminded me of this:

and that made me laugh.

the early bird gets the...ship?

i woke up this morning at 3:30 a.m. tho' i actually had 'til 4:30. and naturally, i couldn't get back to sleep.  so i got up and got ready for my 7:05 flight. because i was spending my day at a ship repair yard. and since i've now got a splitting headache, there's a mouse in the house (thank you, lila) and my family is yelling at me to watch coupling with them on BBC entertainment, i'll leave you with some scenes from my day.

even the trash is beautiful at a shipyard.

and so are the containers in which they lift it off the ship

not sure what this is, but it looks cool.

dry dock

now that's a really, really big spool

do not press the red button.

there are always ropes posing nicely onboard a ship.

more tomorrow.