Back from France

I am back again from France where I spent 10 days with a photography-group. I loved the mediterranean way of life and enjoyed all the flowers and butterflies in bloom!
Together with some friends I visited a "vide grenier" and found these lovely old laces there, don't you like them?

A new beginning... flowers are blooming

 
 
 

Soft light

 

A delicate flower, this "akelei", a white one, pure and so nicely made...
(photo by Christien)

Leo Patrone, wedding photography

I often read blogs from the USA, and there seems to be a tendency there to have a wedding in a simple but beautiful style. Often with a simple dress, in a farmhouse in the countryside and with incredible attention to detail and styling.
In one of the blogs I read about Leo Patrone, a photographer born in Argentina, and he just makes the most beautiful pictures...

I don't know this couple, but wow... I love the soft colours on these photos.

Check out lots more photos of Leo Patrone on his website:
www.leopatronephotography.com.
Often his photos are published or used for a series on weddings.

Taro Gomi... what an inspiration!

Recently I bought a book of Taro Gomi, a Japanese man. It is a book about drawing with children and it is amazing!! The book is actually so simple, but so inspiring. It triggers the fantasy of children, for instance, he has drawn a boat without sails and then the children have to draw and colour the sails themselves. Or you see a blank page and he asks the children to draw the invisible man... but how do you do that? I think grown-ups would draw nothing, but I think children have all kinds of ideas about that.



Anyways I found some photos of him on the site of Chronicle Books, they publish a lot of his books in America, www.chroniclebooks.com.

Just buy one of his books and enjoy!

A day at the office

You know those days at work, when you're a bit tired?
My colleague and I often made jokes, saying: "hey, it's just another day at the office!", followed by a cup of coffee and then straight on to those tasks of the day. It took the pressure off of being in a stressfull job with just so many problems to solve.
Well, yesterday it was a day at the office for me, but wow did I enjoy it! My office is my studio, here you see the window of my studio-kitchen, looking straight out into the fields. The other one is my studio-window.




I spent the whole day working on a new series of paintings, for lunch I went outside, to sit in the sun and I enjoyed making several pictures (lying with my nose on the ground...).




I think those of you who also enjoy making pictures will recognize the joy of looking for a nice picture, seeing the colours, the contrast, the depth. When you're taking pictures of nature you really have to seize the moment, so it's always a bit exciting to see whether you have succeeded.

So this day at the office was great and satisfactory, especially because I took the time to clean up...

Biking away on an island...

So, this weekend we spent a couple of days on Texel... and while it was raining and storming on the main land, we had sunshine and a bit of wind. Because I wanted to discover whether or not I like a biking-holiday, we only had our bikes on the island. And it was fine... We biked all over the island, along the beach, through the dunes. That's just the nice thing about our Dutch islands: there's a long beach, there's wind and there's the Dutch atmosphere of having a "koffie with appelgebak"... Just really nice...

[The second picture shows the boat of the Dutch rescue team, I just liked the bright, fresh colours and the combination]