Category: Europe
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Bathing in paint
We’re back at the Italian pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2011. In an earlier post I had called it a sort of junk art shop. The larger than life portraits of a man and a woman bathing are impressive. Look how true-to-life the water is flowing in plenty over their heads! The open mouths, looking…
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Happy new year
Hope you’ve all made a kiss landing into the year 2015 Photo of the week: Prague, Czech Republic 2007
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Under the Sony roof
Why this photo pleases me: The proportion and partition of light and dark parts within the frame of the picture create a strong, graphic image. The straight lines and their angles versus the curved shape of the roof create a pleasant tension. The fact that the dark part on the lower right seems to be a true multistory…
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With heart and soul
Wow! With her wild flowing hair this poster girl explodes in an outburst of energy and joy! In last week’s post we could admire the natural beauty of Gond women at the village pump. This week it’s admiration for self-willed Western girls in their choice of a musical instrument after their heart. Defying the prevailing…
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Canal towns
Amsterdam, the Venice of the North as it is sometimes called, isn’t the only city in Holland that can boast of its beautiful canals. Canals in historical cities like Alkmaar, Haarlem, Leiden, Delft and Utrecht definitely have got class as well. The canals in Utrecht are very special indeed, because they are different. They are…
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Shipwreck
No, no African boat people drowned in the Mediterranean. Only a harmless event of children at play in a countryside abounding in water. Wet clothes, that’s the only discomfort they’re suffering. A house on the waterfront; a boat or cycle as favourite mode of transport; more Dutch than this you can’t get it. Photos of the week: Weerribben,…
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Weerribben
An old peat bog: after centuries of peat production now a nature reserve to explore leisurely by canoe or silent electric boat. Peat once was popular fuel enabling people to make it through the long, cold winters. With shovels it was dug and cut into bricks, row after row, layer after layer, creating the channels that…
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Giants in the wind
In the last decade the number of electricity generating windmills in Holland has increased considerably. In some regions even to the extent that one can speak of an uncontrolled proliferation, with action groups as a result that protest against the pollution of the horizon. See for example the situation in a part of Flevoland, Holland’s youngest…
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Flatland
Maybe it’s thanks to my Dutch origins that I still remember with delight the little book Flatland, in which Edwin Abbott gives full rein to his mathematical imagination in his description of a two-dimensional world. Although the Dutch landscape – especially its immense, flat polders reclaimed from the sea – does come rather close to…
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Inner worlds
Aesthetically this may not be such a great picture, but it has something beautiful about it that pleases me. Four girls on a lawn dotted with little flowers by the waterfront, and each of them totally absorbed by her own playful discovery of the world. Although they probably have descended here together, each one now…
καιρός remembered 