Pink Moments of Thailand

It's been four weeks already since we came back from Thailand,

and now I found the time to show you these:

a wall in our first hotel room

Bangkok taxis

or better a bike?

tickets for the Royal Palace 

on the train to Hua Hin

new hat

such beautiful flowers!

Ko Tao Island

yes, these are eggs!

at a restaurant

fresh pomegranate juice

having fun with Mama ...

... and Papa!

water sports on Ko Tao

no sports

bying (and eating) loads of tropical fruit every day

temple time on Ko Samui

fancy pink hair, Blythe?

Copy Cat

The new lesson in the painting e-course A Year of Painting by Alena Hennessy is titled "Making it your own". Find some art that speaks to you and paint your own version of it.

I chose Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Venus Verticordia.

And another painting by Tamara de Lempicka that I saw this April at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Turquoise & Pink

Still feeling Japanese.

Pink in Japan

After experimenting with red and blue Japanese style, I needed a little pink again to bring myself into creative balance. I had bought a bamboo calligraphy pen a while ago at the art store and decided to play with it and some ink.

First try:

rather cliché, but good for getting a feel for the bamboo stick

and its special lines

inspired from the Orlik exhibition last week

and those amazing umbrellas:

And now I go back to baking in the sun outside.

Japanese Blue

This is another Yoshiro Tachibana inspired painting, 

this time his blue paintings influenced me. 

Blue - 

a colour I wouldn't be normally drawn to, 

but add a little pink and purple and it works for me.

 Feels more Arabian to me then Japanese though,

must be all that blue.

Paint like in Japan

Japanese Art is the latest lesson in A Year of Painting with Alena Hennessy. Looking at work of Japanese contemporary artists, being inspired by it and trying something new and maybe exotic while painting.

Fittingly there is this exhibition now at the Oldenburg Horst Janssen museum: 

Over a hundred years ago artist Emil Orlik travelled to Japan to learn more about coloured Japanese woodcarving ...

... and was inspired.

Orlik also made a lot of drawings.

I used the work of Japanese artist Yoshiro Tachibana for my inspiration, who in return is very much influenced by modern European painters.

So here is my "inspired copy" of Tachibana's Mother and Child in Red,

stretching my creative muscles with colours I wouldn't normally use

and his special composition:

Paintings, this Week

Surrealist collages were the theme this week 

in Mati Rose McDonough e-course Daring Adventures in Collage.

This really stretched my creative muscles

and is not something I would come up with myself.

Surrealist collage number one turned out rather spiritual ...

 and number two kind of sexy:

Meanwhile my studio floor looks like this:

I am looking forward to two more messy daring collage weeks!

Paintings, this Week

Or more appropriate collages.

I am taking Mati Rose McDonough e-course

Daring Adventures in Collage these weeks.
The perfect summer course.

This week we made "messy collages".
 

After all this messiness I felt like some order too:

Have a beautiful summer weekend!

Hubby cooks vegan

Hubby's weekly vegan cooking has lost its pace recently,

but he has cooked this lentil stew twice in May:

It's the thick lentil soup from "Peace Food".

(German recipe here)

The soup is one of Clara's favourites,

she eats bowl after bowl of it.

To fire up Hubby's vegan cooking again,

he wished for this book for his birthday:

The German edition of the Forks over Knives resipe book

The documentary about the positive impact of a plant-based diet is well worth watching, and now I am looking forward to all those new meals that will come out of this book (browsing through it was appetizing, and cooking without oils sounds adventurous too).