scenes from the spring exhibition

the view from sunday night

the view from sunday night is of one of those dinners that i love best. it's when i rummage around in the refrigerator and throw together something that will probably never be repeated, not because it doesn't taste good, but because i'll never have that particular combination of ingredients lying around at the same time again. this was marinated turkey breast, cauliflower, onions, sweet potatoes and half a bag of fresh spinach, stir-fried together and then i added a jar of apricot-coriander tagine sauce (store-bought). i served it with my new favorite starch - bulgur with vermicelli. it was pretty delicious.

my minfigure collection had a bath today. this house is very dusty - the soil out here is very sandy and we almost always have a west wind blowing - so they definitely needed a good spring cleaning. it took me over an hour. i've got to find a better way to display them, either that or get a cleaning person. tho' that project motivated me to do a lot of other dusting and tidying and vacuuming getting down to the business of pairing up the socks in the sock basket. it has turned a bit cold and grey, so it was a good day to stay inside and do such things. i also baked a banana bread since we had some old black bananas. i always feel both virtuous and in touch with my grandmother when i make banana bread, as it's her recipe i always use.

our local art group had our spring exhibition this weekend - this was how our pieces ended up. i say our because they were pretty equally husband and me, tho' the talisman one hanging on the wall was mine and if i'm honest, the driftwood man in front was mostly husband. i laid out all of the pieces, but he's a genius at putting them together. there was a slightly funny story with the talisman one - i was turning it in and there was a woman writing it into an excel sheet on her computer. i said it was called "talismans" and she actually questioned my english, suggesting that the plural should be talismen. not exactly a dumb idea, but still. and even when i said i was sure it was correct with an "s," she and her boyfriend tried to argue further with me, informing me of how the plural of man is men. and i'm the one who is a native speaker. i wasn't sure whether to laugh or slap them, but you have to admire their cheek. it was a very interesting and well-attended exhibition. i'll share some more photos tomorrow. my internet is quite slow this evening. that happens on sunday evening when everyone down the road must get online as well. it's just one of the "perks" of living out in the country.

i told myself i wasn't going to go for the simpson's minifigs, but always, i couldn't stay away. i didn't get any of the ones i really wanted (marge, lisa) in the first round, so i went back to the employee store on the way home. despite carefully picking a bunch of different bump codes, to try to avoid duplicates, i got several more scratchy and ned flanders. grrr. still no marge and lisa. i think they're onto us with those bump codes and they just don't work anymore. the figures are really pretty cool and i did used to watch the simpson's quite regularly. i think in the states, there's a special lego episode on this evening. i've only seen the trailer, but it looks quite cleverly done. i'm looking forward to seeing that, tho' i don't know when it's going to surface here in denmark.

and that's about it...nothing big or major, just an ordinary weekend.

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.