I created Art. Capital A

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

I did it. I created Art with a capital A, and it hung in a museum. A dream come true. In the Belvedere museum in Vienna, Austria, amidst all grand names of art history.

In fact I completed the work Quasimodo of Franz West. “The title of the installation, “Quasimodo” by Franz West, can be translated as ‘the Incomplete’. Consisting of a forged iron hook and a video, this only becomes complete when the hook is hammered into a wall and objects – or in the worst case one’s self – are hung up on it at will, according to the artist…”

So I asked the attendant if I was allowed to hang up something there. He chuckled shyly, not really knowing how to react. “Oh dear… I just started working here. But I guess… if I you read what the artist says, the idea is to do just that…”

I smiled at him “I totally agree. You are so right, and I would really love to do it!”

While the other visitors watched in a bit of a shock, I hung up my camera. Like a statement: Look! I am temporarily pausing my photography as a tribute to the artist and his art.  Of course by hanging up the camera I prevented myself from taking professional high quality images. Thereby strengthening the incompleteness, as I was powerless and empty handed as a photographer. I could only take a snapshot with my mobile phone. For me, this snapshot now has become a piece of art in itself, mirroring different layers over the original work.

I call it: Sicut modo. So happy with it!

Art and adoration. I went to Vienna just to see this picture. Recently I visited the Klimt experience at the Fabrique de Lumières in Amsterdam. That raised a few memories: The shop in Amsterdam so many years ago when I was a high school teenager. The cards I found there – all about Jugendstil and fairies and so. And this one that I immediately loved.

So I decided to go and see it. No reproduction can give the feeling of the real thing. I tried to take pictures of the shimmering gold and silver particles, but it’s impossible. You have to see it for yourself. In the Belvedere museum in Vienna.

Art touches one´s sense of beauty. Museums always tickle my creativity and wake up my inner muse. There is so much beauty all around! Just a glimpse out of the window tells me there is a world full of splendor waiting to be transformed into masterpieces. And after leaving the building, I feel enlightened and ready to create the most stunning art myself. View of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna through the blackout screen of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien.

View from the Albertina museum in Vienna. Wherever you look, the world will show beauty.

It’s definitely not only the paintings that you should see in the Museum of Art History in Vienna. This is a view of the restaurant…

You just cannot not look up here. Is to too much Baroque here in the lower Belvedere?

All that glitters is… yes, gold!

Back to Jugendstil

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

Floating away into the wonderful world of Jugenstil and Art deco. That is another way to go back in time. I love this period of more than a century ago, when books were written with words that had a life of their own and paintings offered a dreamy world where miracles were just about to happen. This portrait was taken almost two years ago, and needed the time to grow into this aquarel style

In the footsteps of dragons (part 2)

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

Let me take you to another magnificent place with dinosaur footprints. Above is the breathtaking view from Monte Pelmetto in the Italian Dolomites.

Turning a little to the right youy see a rock that broke off from Monte Pelmetto and came tumbling down. Look carefully! Do you see the tiny dots?

These prints are even older than the prints from Portugal. They date back to some 220 million years ago, the Triassic period, when the mountains still had to born and this was a flat and muddy area. Three different species have left their marks here. According to sources I cannot verify these were probably Ornithischia, Celurosauri and Prosauropoda.

In the footsteps of dragons (part 1)

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

A special place in the Algarve is Salema Beach, Praia da Salema, near Vila do Bispo. There you can find well preserved dinosaur footprints right at the beach. As you can see, the toes are round and without claws, which indicates that these are the prints of a herbivore, an Ornithopod, a bit like an Iguanodon.

It is estimated that these prints are roughly 130 million years old, dating from the Early Cretaceous. Standing in these footprints of dragons long ago spurred my imagination with fantasies of time machines and walking between those animals in another era.

Let me show you one of the magnificent beaches in the Algarve! Lovely to spend some time here, in between the chase for dinosaur prints at Salema.

Incredible to witness these dinosaur tracks and imagine how some 130 million millions years ago, huge lizards roamed this place. Salema Beach has more footprints, but they are well hidden. You´ll probably need a local guide to help you out, for even if you are standing close to these vertical rock formations the prints are difficult to see. António Alfarroba pointed them out. As you can see this one does have claws, so it must have been hunting for prey here. I´m afraid I haven´t been able to find out the exact species – if you do know it, you’re welcome to mention it.

Last month´s sketches

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

Something completely different. Bread. The very first I ever baked, and it means so much to me! You have no idea. I took a huge risk given the visitor I expected. Simple recipe: whole grain flour, yeast, water and the simplest oven you can imagine. And it worked! It’s like magic.

Lovely to see the first ones of the year. In the backyard here in Hollandsche Rading, the winter jasmine is abundantly flowering.

Seeing this I realised I desperately need more yellow and summer colours. So this one is of a summer that feels so long ago.

Last one is of a visit to the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar. There are a few items on permanent display that bring out the inner child in everyone – at least, they definitely did in me. Like Leandro Erlich’s swimming pool, Ron Mueck’s Couple under an Umbrella, the Open Ended maze of Richard Serra and the tiny elevators of Maurizio Cattelan. 

At the moment there is an exhibition of the Italian artist Guiseppe Penone, who works with natural materials like trees and marble and leather, using the objects as a kind of memory or footprint of what has been. If you allow your mind to wander in his world, thoughts of interconnectedness of all visible and physical objects come up, of memories in the physical world and how we give meaning to what we experience with our senses. 

This picture below is of Tiger, tiger, tiger; the hidden tigers at the bottom of porcelain of the Ming Dynasty of Ai Weiwei.

Aphrodite´s mercy

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

After the hailstorm Aphrodite showed her kindness. When we drove back along the coast, right at the place where according to the legends she had come ashore so long ago, she surprised us with a stunning sunset. Aphrodite’s rock, near Paphos, is a mythical place. It is said that if you swim around the rock, you will find true love. I’m afraid I only read that the next day…

Aphrodite’s rage

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

Was she angry? For three days already we were on the island and still had not visited her temple to pay her tribute. This was after all her island. Kronos, leader of the Titans, had castrated his tyrannical father Uranus and thrown his thingy in the sea. Then the water had started to fizz and out of the foam arose Aphrodite, goddess of love, sexuality, fertility and beauty.

On the way to her sanctuary we stopped at the remnants of the ancient city Koúrion. We barely had time to see it. Dark clouds descended from the Olympus, and a hailstorm came upon us so fiercely that it damaged the front window of our car. With the last hailstones still drumming on the car, we drove directly towards the holy temple of the Aphrodite near Paphos. Immediately her mood improved, for the dark clouds drifted to the sea and soon even the sun showed itself again.

Thousands of years ago this place had attracted people from all over the world: the Mediterranean sea with all its islands and many countries in Europe, the Middle-East and Africa. People attended ceremonies and made offerings. The Roman historian Tacitus described the altar and a sacred stone: “Blood may not be shed upon the altar, but offering is made only with prayers and pure fire. The altar is never wet by any rain, although it is in the open air. The representation of the goddess is not in human form, but it is a circular mass that is broader at the base and rises like a turning-post to a small circumference at the top. The reason for this is obscure.”

This was the very stone.

Aphrodite was also depicted in her human form. For the goddess of love and fertility and sexuality, an offer could be to sacrifice the own body as in ancient times, making love was seen as a sacred act.

This idea has roots that go back more than 7.000 years ago, to the Sumerian cult of Inanna. In Cyprus the first settlements dated from 3.300 year before Christ. In that time the Phoenician goddess of Astarte was worshipped, also a goddess of sexuality, fertility and war. In the Greek period, Astarte became Aphrodite, and the city of Paphos was known throughout the world for it’s parties, wine and prostitutes. The stone at this sanctuary never became Venus, as the Roman Emperor Theodosius I outlawed all pagan religions in the year 391 and the sanctuary of Aphrodite fell into ruins.

Partial eclipse of October 25, 2022

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

A few days ago I was on the ground with my nose in mushrooms. Today I looked up in the sky. I had completely forgotten about it: the partial eclipse. Fortunately a colleague sent a message: “It’s happening right now!”

I grabbed my camera and ran outside – just in time to see the moon at its maximum cover of one third of the sun.

Same picture twice, just a different crop.

Next show in the Netherlands is predicted in 2025. Already looking forward to it.

Magical mushroom shedding spores by night

Geplaatst op door Henk Groenewoud

I saw a group of fly agarics, very nice for a beautiful night portrait. But when I arrived at the site in the dark, they had disappeared, broken down. Maybe run over by dogs, maybe taken by passers-by, but gone.

Fortunately the flashlight showed a few nice specimens in a meadow along the path. I knelt in the grass, put the flashlight on the camera bag and started to set up my gear: small tripod under the camera, setting ISO / shutter speed / aperture, focus… and then I heard something buzzing and rustling in front of me.

“Must be a beetle!” I thought hopefully. It sounded like a big one. Also nice for a night photo!

The insect jumped to the light, and tried to sort of crawl into the flashlight.

Not a beetle, but a European hornet. Our largest native wasp, even larger than the so-called terror wasp, the Asian hornet. One of those whoppers that you can hear flying by like a helicopter. Immediately afterwards, a second one landed in the illuminated grass. That one also seemed very interested in the light.

European hornets are quite large in their own right, but I did not know that they grew even three times as large in the dark. And that each hornet split into several individuals during the night. That is to say, these two insects sounded like there were five or ten of them.

The first one became bored with the flashlight, and began to inspect my camera. The second one flew first to the light, then to my camera bag. I wondered how I could lie down and operate my gear without running the risk of accidentally grabbing an insect. And I wondered if these two would be the only ones. A memory came to mind: that time when I accidentally sat on the edge of a lake on top of a wasp’s nest in the ground, and after being stung twice in my leg had to run to avoid worse. And I remembered the articles I’d collected about dogs, hikers, and cyclists accidentally getting too close to a ground nest of European hornets and being attacked by an angry swarm. Then the first hornet decided to inspect me.

I turned off the light and took a little distance. And after a minute or so, when all movement and noise subsided, I carefully walked back to get my stuff and go home. No night photo of the fly agarics today.

I didn’t go back until two days later. And what I hoped for, succeeded this time: catching the spores being spread by the fly agaric. There is a lot of Photoshop in this photo, but the spores are really real! Wonderful to experience the magic of the forest this way.

I learned a few things. The fly agarics are always redder on the other side of the path. European hornets are three times larger at night than during the day, and split into several individuals at night. And for forest photography you sometimes need a little patience