Rockies

The outdoor season is here. Going to present my work at some artfairs and markets. Especially made these 'Rockies'. Flat stones, 15x15cm, painted at both sides. Back side a seahorse, front covered with the Banggai Cardinal, Pterapogon kauderni. Limited edition of nine, handmade artworks.
More details on this lovely fish in my blog; or order prints, mugs, Tees and more i my printshop.

Backside Rockies

Pterapogon kauderni, the well known Banggai Cardinal, painted on flat rocks.

Tropical heat

"Tears of a cloud" 40x40cm, Acrylics & Sand on Canvas.
Painting (or prints) available, again...

Friday we had the first tropical day of the year. It ended with thunder and lightning. As usual. The lightning bolts reminded me of a small abstract painting I had made, named 'Tears of a cloud'. Question was, as usual, where did I put it? Somehow it had found a safe place. It took me a long, long time to find it, as usual...
I know it was shown in an exhibition, guess in Belgium. And i know someone asked me to keep it apart. Well, the date on the back of the painting says '2010', so I guess I've waited long enough.
Sad how some people make promises they never keep. Tears of a cloud suddenly has another meaning...

Squared

Buy this item AM214132

Except for the old fashioned dictionary, yes it's a regular page turner to me!, I also use several websites to translate words. Best thing of these sites is they're not only useful to translate, they also provide additional information. If you're not a native speaker, like me, you will also need some websites to find synonyms. After all, if you didn't grow up in a country it's hard to understand the 'slang of the street'. 

For instance, when I first heard the song "Hip to be square", by Huey Lewis and the News, I didn't have a clue what the expression meant. 

One of the most helpful sites I have found is wordhippo. Unfortunately, when I looked for the meaning of the word 'square', I ended up with over 48 meanings. So sometime I need to use another source. Curious what the song is about? It's perfectly explained on Wikipedia. Or just listen to the song. After all that's what music is all about.
Oh, and 'square' of course also means four-sided or right-angled. Like the Sand Tile pictured above...

Ex Index

There was a time I was student at the P.A. Tiele Academie (The Hague) to become a librarian. Didn't work out that way. However I still benefit the lessons about classification. I have witnessed the transfer from old style Librabry Index Cards to full digital systems. Yep, those were the days. Pulling drawers filled with numerous index cards. Some of them still handwritten. Would 'The Raven' be indexed as 'The' or as 'Raven'? Or should you have a look at 'Edgar', 'Allen' or 'Poe'? 

DDC vs UDC. Dewey's Decimal Classification versus the Universal Decimal Classification. Lessons about information storage and retrieval. I have strolled the catalogue of index cards of the former Library at the Museum of Natural History in Leiden many times. By hand. Running my fingers along the thousands of index cards. Searching for new data on some of my favorite fish. Making xerograph copies using one of those huge copiers. I travelled by bike from Delft to Leiden. Everyone who has been at the old museum, will never forget the way it smelled. The strange scent of books and formalin. It will not become succesfull in any perfume shop...

Nowadays the cataloge of the library is available online. Part of Naturalis Biodiversity Center. No doubt Google will be of help too. 
I have started to make Index Reference Cards on my books. Including additional information like a list of characters, my inspiration and more. These are now used as basic datasheet in my blogs about my books, Flash Fiction and Short Stories. 

Some of my visits have led to articles in hobby magazines, for instance on the genus Megalamphodus. Pretty characids and popular aquarium fish which are now (re)considered members of the genus Hyphessobrycon. 
This article includes some of my first fish drawings published in an official magazine. I noticed I still used my initials (EM) instead of my present signature in those days. And, now that I come to think of it, some of my first photos of fish. I used color slides in those days. (Oh boy! Another piece of history...).

Megalamphodus rogoaguae, additional lines, to indicate outline of fins, 
from M. sweglesi. (Drawing published in Meinema, 1988) 

Tulipmania

Holland is well known for its cultivated tulips. The flower has become a national symbol used by the Tourist Office and many other organisations. But, just like other European countries, The Netherlands also has a species of tulip 'living in the wild'. 

These small tulips, known as Tulipa sylvestris, orginally grew in Italy. Around 1600 the flowers were imported from Bologna, Italy, to the northern European countries where they were planted in gardens and parks. They didn't stay there...The little bulbs with yellow flowers have spread themselves in many habitats, and have become part of the endemic nature. Thanks to the trade in tulipbulbs the Dutch are still leading the trade in these flowerbulbs. Mind you, this trade has lead to the first economic crisis in Holland in 1637, known as Tulipmania. The price of a single tulipbulb had raised to Hfl. 10,000, enough to buy yourself a house along the canals of Amsterdam (in those days, that is...). Alas, the market collapsed, leading many people to despair and even bankrupcy. Moralistic Dutch painters have since then used this Tulipmania as inspiration, warning people not to become greedy, like the monkeys in Jan Breughel's painting, a great persiflage. I guess even the Dutch are only human...

Anyway, those days are far behind us. Trading tulips is still profitable. Painting them as well. I made this funny image, used in my Skredch-blog, which is now available in a limited edition of 30 ID's (original, handmade copies), Acrylics on paper. I made a combination of the tulip and my Dutch Quixote Skredch-character upon genuine Dutch wooden shoes (see picture on top of this blog). Just for fun, but also to please my granddaughter.

Also available: Mugs, Tees and more fun stuff including the image pictured hereunder. Click here to visit my pintshop.

Kiss Kiss

Few years ago I made a couple of surrealistic paintings. Little did I know, I would be able to use one of these paintings as inspiration for a book cover. I wanted the cover of ‘Erratic’ (the erratic life of Porsche Gibeon) to summarize the things women like best: make-up and shoes. Referring to the profession of the protagonist Porsche Gibeon, Tee-designer, the cover design also had to be usable as print on a T-shirt.

Reducing stories into one image is something I use in my Skredch-blog. Events of daily life are reduced into drawings, or pictographs, based on one or only a few basic lines. A style resembling comics or cartoons, which I think is not appropriate for this ‘edgy romance’ novel. I had to think of something new.

Finishing the first book on Porsche Gibeon, I remembered my surreal artwork ‘Kissemee’: a woman symbolized by lips. (The picture on the left is published in our catalogue for the Holland Art Fair, The Hague, 2005). Using this remarkable image as basis, I have created the character pictured above, which only consists of shoes and lips. A perfect summary, realistic, reproducible upon Tees and providing possibilities to create similar images for future books in this series.

Kiss Kiss, is a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl, master of the ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. As admirer of this great author, I have used surprising twists as an important element of Porsche’s story. 

My surrealistic painting as published on the cover of our catalogue for the
Holland Art Fair 2005 (The Hague, The Netherlands)

ID´s

During the first years my wife and I were running our art gallery, we used to sell serigraphs, giclees and other kinds of copied artworks. Besides the orginal artwork of course. The number of copies used to be limited anywhere between 200 or 250. The actual number is mostly handwritten next to the artist´s signature. All in pencil. In other words, if the writing states 23/250, it means you have copy number 23 of a series of 250. So the series is limited... Except for an unknown number of copies, called the EA edition. This edition, the Epreuve d´Artiste, is supposed to be a test series for the artist to decide whether the colors and quality of the serigraph is according his wishes. The number of EA copies varies from only a few to ten...or more. When we learned that some artists made a re-runs of certain succesful series, in other words the limited number of 250 was raised with a second series of 250  numbered copies, we decided to quit selling these editions and focused our selling to original artworks. 

A few years ago more and more artists disapproved of the uncontrollable serigraphs. Large editions are nowadays out of fashion. Instead, artists have smalle series of prints made and then complete these copies with additional artwork. A simple serigraph thus becomes an original artwork, although the basis is still a printed copy made by a printer, not by the artist.

Quality of prints is amazingly good these days. Even regular desktop printers will provide high quality material. Nevertheless, I prefer to have smaller series completely made by myself. I call these copies ID´s, short for Identicals. Although they are not really identical, but more or less similar to the original. Every item is handmade and thus differs in colors and shape from the original. All editions in a series are therefor 100% original pieces of art. More valuable than serigraphs and nice to collect. 

Buy artprints, mugs, Tees and more of 'Lance' at my printshop