A few years ago, I made this spread in my big Moleskin sketchbook. These are all excerpts from a wonderful diary that my maternal grandfather left us. I picked some fragments to write down about him going to America with his family when he was only 17, but also about his experiences during WW I when he just returned from there.Now I'm working on a new concertina book about this America adventure, rearranging the fragments into another size of paper and leaving out the war-section. I added a small family tree for better understanding.At the end of last year, for several weeks, I used an app on my phone to record bird songs. I was quite curious about how many different birds would come to our garden or fly over? Every day, early in the morning, I put my phone on the windowsill for about 15 minutes and I must say, I was rather surprised about the result: 34 different species until now. We are not so very far from a few nature preserves and the birds are not all coming into the garden but still! This was a good starting point for a new concertina book and ... I learned a lot about birds, their names and how they look!My latest concertina book is the prime example of achieving a satisfying outcome despite of having little or no inspiration. I started with the vintage safety match box - found on the net - because of the sunflower. The writing and painting tools followed. And in the end I added the calendar where I filled in everyday temperature, measured promptly at noon. The whole book forms a unity because of the color yellow. The more wintertime approaches, the more I feel the urge to use warm color schemes because it makes me forget cold and mist and rain and the early dark of winter's evening.This is a small herbal book from the time long before my current concertina books. I remember writing it with a quill after I learned how to cut one. Since that time, I hardly ever wrote italic again. I realized that it wasn't my thing. Uncial, however, and capital letters, feel much better to me. And I still had to discover the beautiful rounded shapes of Carolingian minuscule! Most of my books now are written or drawn in some kind of Carolingian script.
I've been very fortunate to host a workshop in Torino, Italy. A city that I didn't visit yet and I was pleasantly surprised by its beauty and its old history! Since I came back, I started a new concertina book about all the fantastic things I saw. Below, you can see a small map of the city center where I taught and where I stayed in a splendid palazzo. And how much I enjoyed drawing this map as precise as possible! I'm pretty sure that I'm going to draw other maps in the future.Today is World Pet Day! I remember, when I was a child, my dream was to have a dog hotel. I was crazy about dogs, trusted all of them and was petting every dog I came across in the street. I was lucky, never been bitten. The whippet in this concertina book is so decorative, he was literally begging to be painted!
I love butterflies and I never get tired of painting them. Here's two details of a concertinabook I made in 2009.
Since 2001 I'm making these oblong concertina books. The term 'concertina' refers to a method of parallel folding with the folds alternating between front. This picture shows a detailed view of two of these books. Mustn't read too much into it: the top one is just a compilation of different paintings and text blocks without any cohesion. The only consistency would be color. The bottom one is about an long adventurous trip I made from Belgium to Iran. |
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Mei 2023
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