Happy New Year & Epiphany

This is a picture postcard that I designed in the mid 1980s. The image was used as a seasons greetings card, and shows a contemporary evocation of the Three Magi.

Illustration Style

This entry shows divers, it is in illustration style.

Een bijdrage met duikers, de stijl is illustratief.

Study in Indian Ink and Poster Colour, 2011 (30 x 20 cm)

Style attempt: SciFi

Een vervolg in stijloefeningen. Een Portugees oorlogsschip als science fiction voorwerp.


Style exercises continued. A Portuguese Man-o-War as a sci-fi object.

Indian Ink and poster Colour, 2011 (30 x 20 cm)

New Style Attempts

De winterdag met weinig helder licht is geschikt voor grafisch werk. Hierbij stijloefeningen in zwart-wit: een Portugees oorlogsschip als mode-impressie.

Winter, when bright light is scarce, is the time to take up graphical work. Herewith style attempts in black and white: a Portuguese Man-O-War as a fashion image. 

Both:  Studies in Indian Ink and Poster Colour, 2011 (30 x 20 cm)

mourning cockle

Kokkelschelp, watercolour, 2011 (30 x 20 cm)

I was told that in the views that prevail in some Asian areas, a shell is the home of an entity that is no longer a living being. 

And so this signifies the presence of death. 

The circumstance that a few people that I know left this life recently reminded me of this. 

Then, I created this mourning cockle shell.

Dat in sommige streken in Azië de opvatting heerst dat een schelp het tehuis is van een individu dat niet langer leeft, is me bekend.

Daarom verwijst dat naar de dood. 

De omstandigheid dat onlangs enkele mensen die ik ken het leven hebben verlaten bracht dit weer onder mijn aandacht.

Daarop maakte ik deze rouwende kokkelschelp.

Cockle

Cardium edule (B 671),  watercolour 2011 ( 17 x 27 cm )

The Cockle, model  671, a bivalve mollusc, stimulates my fantasy. I entertain the idea that Rudolf Blaschka, when on a field trip in upper Italy and the Adriatic in 1879, saw live Cockles for sale in the market of one of the fishing villages.  Animals with their protuding extended feet feeling for a way out of the container.

The squid Loligopsis Veranii

 Loligopsis Veranii (B. 564), watercolour 2011 (c. 30 x 20 cm)

 I felt challenged to do a study on the squid  Loligopsis Veranii, or more precisely: to do a study of its image as it is produced and reproduced over and over again.

The original design starts in the mid nineteenth century.  In 1851 Jean Baptiste Vérany, published his “Mollusques méditeranéens”. Our squid is then pictured at plate # 38. 

Father and son Blaschka based a glass model of this species on this very image, and a photograph of it can be found on the site of the Corning Museum of Glass. 

In the  Blaschka sales cataloge for the 1880s it was offered as model # 564.

Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist  and inspriration of Jugendstil (which mor or less equals to "German Art Nouveau")  presented the shape of this squid as natural beauty.

He was driven to stimulate the decorative arts  by means of the images and shapes found in nature in his Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in nature). In this Album, published in installments in the period 1899-1904, our squid is pictured at plate # 54. 

And here is my study, at last.