March 31.2023

Old Town Prague

Winding streets twist and turn,

And often narrow to alleys.

Cars and clusters of Ubber electric scooters 

Line the cobbled streets and sidewalks.

The glorious facades of the five-story buildings are

A rainbow of pastel colours.

The exteriors of these upstairs apartments are 

Covered with embellishment, reminding me of wedding cakes.

Domes, towers, balconies and roofs are decorated with 

Stone sculptures, often of nearly naked men or women. 

At street level are cafes, pubs, hotels, bakeries, ATM’s,

Sprinkled in with brand name shops such as Hermes, Victorinox, Hugo Bosh.

In one shop window, a man in a dazzling, white shirt and immaculate black suit,

Uses a tiny brush to whisk away the dust in a jewelry display.

Outside in  the 10th-century main square,

Located between Wenceslas Square and Charles Bridge, 

Giant rabbits and eggs are decorations for Easter.

Vendors cook hams, goulash and chimney cakes

On outdoor fires.

Some vendors sell baked goods, cheeses, and souvenirs.

An accordion and a bass player fill the square with music and dance.

While the spires of churches, palaces and government buildings

Catch the last of the day’s sun.

March 29, 2023

                    On the way to the airport, back in February, I noticed the winter colour of the blueberry 

                        fields with some white pines behind.  I did a little sketch to remind me of this image

                             and this week, while playing around with skies, I decided to try it. There was                               

                           a second  sky experiment on the bottom of the sheet and I decided that instead of the                       blueberry field coming right into the foreground, I would change it into an inlet with reflections.  It felt

good to paint Nova Scotia again even though we are in Germany.

Another quartersheet watercolour inspire by the Uelzen Market.  This time the vegetable stall.

The roses aren't quite finished but they are getting there.

this is the sketch, that I did in the car on the way to the airport.

Tomorrow, we are off to Prague for a week.

 

March 23. 2023

I thought this one was finished before we went to Holland but thinking about it while we were away, I decided it needed another layer on the sky and that I needed to subdue the buildings just a little bit. So here is is, the first one that I thought was done and then with another layer on the sky and some darkening of shadows on the buildings.

March 22,2023

Cherry blossoms in Amsterdam

Canal in Amsterdam

Rembrant's kitchen (Amsterdam)

                                                          Girls waiting for a train in Amsterdam

People sit at train stations

Clutching cellphones.

They stomp along in crowds

Conversing alone.

They are a river of bicyclists

Racing along narrow bike-lanes,

Wedges between car traffic and pedestrians.

Earbuds firmly in,

They take calls, list to music,

Check train schedules.

Signs on shops say

"NO CASH; cards only".

Credit cards are on phones,

As well as tickets to art museums,

Directions, emails, banking,

Menus at restaurants.

Check-in codes for hotels,

Fares for tram cars.

No longer do people handle money.

Contactless transactions are the new norm.

                                                              

march19 Amsterdam

 Bikers, helmet-less

Often in pristine dresses, skirts or business suits,

Sit upright and pedal hard and fast.

They are a cycling river.

The bike lanes are narrow

Weaving between the cars and us, the pedestrians,

Twisting around light poles and

Electric car charging stations.

 

Many of the bikes have large front carts,

Containing one or two children,

Sometimes an adult,

Often a dog.

It is exhilarating to see this river

Of human energy.

Though, I long to ride a bike again

I would never ride in Amsterdam.

March14, 2023

 Four more paintings worked on. I did another small painting of the tulips. This time they were a little bit opened.    By the time we return from Amsterdam in another week, they will all be open or dead.

The tiny still life was so appealing that I did half sheet, still life of the little plant and the salt shaker, and the large leafed parsley in the lovely shaped green wine bottle.  Finally we could eat the pear, the garlic, and the orange!  And I am planning to bring the wine bottle home for future still lifes.

I’ve almost finished the half sheet, night painting.  For some reason, I decided to try it on hot pressed paper instead of my usual cold pressed paper. I feel like I have been fighting the paper all the way through.  It is like painting on glass and the paint doesn’t stay put.

Yesterday at suppertime,  we had a beautiful sky.  Back to rain today.  This morning I decided to try to capture the gorgeous sky from last evening with the rooflines and tops of the town of Uelzen that we see out our window. 

Tomorrow, we are off by train to Holland to look at the art among other things. My new small pack is too small for a quarter sheet of paper so I will just take along a bunch of tiny watercolour pieces for sketches and tiny paintings. Hopefully we will have Facebook at our hotel  Amsterdam and I will transcribe some of these blog postings into Facebook postings.

March 10, 2023

This morning, I awoke to another snowy day in Uelzen, Germany. Kids are throwing snow balls, people are scrapping sidewalks. It is quite slippery for the folks still riding their bicycles.

  With the snow on the roofs, my night time view from my window, looks much different with snowy roofs and so I continued working for a couple of hours on the large still life, I started yesterday.

 

When I got tired of working on it, I looked closely at the tulips that I bought yesterday. When they open, (if they open before we head off to Holland next Wednesday) I am hoping to do a large very loose tulips painting.  In the meantime, I did a tiny sketch of the tulips that I bought yesterday. 

I am reading a most fascinating book in my time off, Glenn Gould, Music and Mind, by Geoffrey Payment.  It is a bit of a tough read but I am enjoying reading about the idiosyncrasies of a creative person.  Lots of them I identify with. I pulled this book off Emily’s book shelf in our apartment not knowing that it was a recent gift to Emily from her father, Phil, just prior to his death.  Emily is doing a big music adjudication this June in preparation for studying for a degree in Music Education.  I can see why her Dad gave her this book.  The start of the book upto about page twenty-five is really about the importance of playing with the heart, in addition to playing with the music.   When I was forty, I took fiddle classes every Friday night with an excellent music teacher Peter Dunn. For many of the folks who played by ear in the class, Peter would tell them “Pay attention to the music”.  For me, who easily could read music, Peter would always remind me to play with heart and stop focusing on the music! 

Since we arrived in Uelzen, I have had a relationship with a pigeon, sitting on the top of a roof in my view out the window.  “Aren’t you cold, aren’t you lonely?” I would ask him.

Then yesterday, Jim noticed two smaller pigeons on the roof and I realized that my pigeon friend is not a pigeon at all but the top of a chimney that appears over the ridge-line of the house.