Jump start

Heeeeey. I think' it’s too late to say HNY by now, but I hope you’re as well as you can be? December kicked my butt (we all ended up with Covid over xmas - ho ho ho) and January is… January. Hard work. I feel eternally tired and find it tricky to spend any time not at home. I’m usually fine with hibernating, but this winter feels different. So, can we fake it ‘til we make it I wonder? Can I somehow trick myself out of this stupor? Well, in little over a week this wonderful human is coming to stay with us. Can’t really think of a better way to brighten up this toughest of months. What a treat.

Some kind of magic

It feels like it’s been a while since there’s been an awe-inspiring installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. In fact, maybe it’s been years or maybe even a decade. Well, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon is a definite must-see. In fact, I’d like to go back on a sunny day to see how different it might look - can it glimmer even more than this? I hope you can sense the scale of these, as they’re absolutely huge. I’ve seen Anatsui’s work before, but not on this scale. To explain what these are made out of, I’ve copied and pasted this from his website: Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of aluminium bottle caps sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take new forms every time they are installed. Mind blowing. It’s on until April 14th 2024, so if you like what you see and you happen to be in town before then, well you know the drill. Go.

Tiny house

There was one more thing I wanted to show you from the Rijks. And what a thing it is. It’s this dolls’ house that belonged to Petronella Oortman, built in the late 1600’s. Oortman was a wealthy widow (who later remarried) and had the house and furniture made for her, which ended up costing as much as a full scale one. Rich women commissioned these houses to show off their wealth, and this particular one ended up in the museum. Shall we have a little look round it?

The house and furniture within were all built to scale, using the same materials as their full scale versions. Again with the workmanship! And I love the fabric on the wall - very very cool. I’m not familiar with the lay out of Dutch merchants’ houses of the era, but I think this is supposed to be a kids’ bedroom on the ground floor.

And here is the kitchen, with real marble for the flooring. We’ve been watching a programme on Channel 4 called The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge (really rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?), so I was more drawn to this than I have been on previous visits. And now that I’m older I’m definitely more attuned to highly skilled workmanship, as I can appreciate it on a whole other level. I think it’s related to how most things are done so cheaply and of low quality these days, that when you see things made with proper care and attention, they really stand out. I recently read this article in the Observer about current craftspeople and found it inspiring and reassuring.

Apparently Oortman had these small pieces of porcelain made and sent over from China. Zoom in and have a closer look - they are quite something.

The mural in this room was painted by a proper artist too - no wonder it cost a fortune! In fact Oortman was so proud of it she commissioned Jacob Appel to paint a painting of the dolls’ house, which is also in the Rijks. In it you can see that some of the rooms look different, so maybe parts of the house have been damaged over the centuries, or maybe she chose to update the decor after the painting was made.

A hallway. Fancy fancy.

Is this a dressing room? With what they wore back in those days it would probably take an hour or two just to get dressed. They might even have paused half-way through for a cuppa, judging by the china on console table. Haha, I think i’m forgetting that this is a dolls’ house aren’t I? All the dolls, apart from the little baby that you see seated to the right, were sadly lost at some point.

The top floor bedroom with amazing details all around.

I really liked these two rooms at the top, with the laundry hanging on rails and the coal store at the top of the last little set of stairs. The house inspired the writer Jessie Burton to write The Miniaturist, which also became a TV-series, and I’ve read and watched both of them and enjoyed them, even if they’re a bit trashy. It was so nice to be transported to 17th century Amsterdam and drink in some of the (very dramatic) atmosphere. So there you go, the smallest house tour ever, just for you.

P.S. A snuck this pic of me looking at it, which was very helpful, as this way you can really see the scale of it. Big and small at same time (Biggie Smalls anyone?).

Rijksmuseum time

Yo! Thought it was time for a design refresh here. Lately I just wasn’t feeling the blog, and so I thought that maybe, if I went back on Instagram for a bit (after a 4 & 1/2 year hiatus), it would make me want to blog again - and it worked! I only lasted five days on IG before I deleted it again, and came away from it knowing that I needed to change the look of the blog a bit - just like how painting a room a new colour makes you see it with new eyes. So funny that I knew exactly what I had to do to trick myself into blogging again. Anyway, back to the post…

Just being in Amsterdam for three days meant that I had to strip down the visit to the essentials, and with there being a dearth of good exhibitions on, I decided that our cultural outing had to be a visit to the Rijksmuseum. We got there first thing in the morning when they opened (the only way to get in without having to face a long queue), and started our visit with breakfast in the museum café, where we admired this tulipiere in the picture above, which is how tulips were displayed in the 17th century. If you’d like to buy one this size today it would set you back about €18 000! My friend A really wanted to buy one, but a smaller sized one in the gift shop was €400, so my picture of it had to do instead.

This painting by Vermeer is one that I always have to seek out when I go, I love it so. I have a postcard of it on my fridge so I get to see it every day, but seeing it in person can’t be beat.

These stars, in the ceiling in an atrium part of the museum, were added in the 10-year controversially long refurbishment of the museum, and each one was hand painted in situ. I bet the people painting them dreamt about stars for the duration it took them to finish the project.

The museum library is a beautiful space that you can peek your head into from a mezzanine level; I’ll take better pictures next time I promise. Most of the time when I take pictures I don’t think of shooting it in a way that makes sense on the blog. In fact I don’t really take pictures for the blog, I just take pictures that I want to take and then post whatever I think I can make sense of - in blog form. It’s only afterwards that I think ‘Oh you idiot, why didn’t you take a wider shot, or why didn’t you get a shot of the outside of the building?!’ etc. But you know what? It doesn’t actually matter. I’m me, and this is my corner of the internets, and this is how I blog. S’all good.

Back to the aaaaarrrrttt then. I have never seen portrait tiles before. Have you? I likes it.

And the details on this late 17th century wooden cabinet - mijn god!

I didn’t get any good wide pictures as it was quite dark, but you can see the whole thing here. Can’t even imagine the amount of hours this would’ve taken to make. But if you do this, with this much skill, you surely must be in heaven making it.

These two! They were quite small, which I reckon made them even more special. The highlights on the gooseberries! The fuzzy peaches! Mind blown.

Next time I go to Amsterdam (which won’t be too long from now - woohoo!) I want to go to this spot of Herengracht and see how different it looks now - with my own eyes.

I think this was my favourite painting this visit. It just looked so contemporary. Must have been quite an unusual depiction back in 1645-50 when it was painted. I also quite want her hat.

A having a rest in between all the looking and walking. That little rest on a bench in a museum/exhibition is one of my favourite moments. Both your legs and your brain needs a breather after a while, but then, just few minutes later, you’re ready to go again, refreshed.

This guy… just amazing. Like an olden day angry emoji, no?

Loved this cabinet - so modern, yet so clearly very old.

Can’t remember exactly what era this sealed off replica room was from, but it was very grand and atmospheric. Shame I didn’t get a better pic of it (enough with the complaining).

I just can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to look at things that excite me so much so easily. So grateful to all the artists everywhere that create such amazing pieces of art, and have done for hundreds and hundreds of years, and that there are museums where I can go and see it up close for myself. These two paintings of two people not doing anything special were also some of my favourites this time round.

The night before going to Amsterdam, when I said goodnight to Oomoo, we talked about how cool/strange it is that patterns in nature repeats itself so much, and on different scales. Like how a tree, vein, plant root, lightning bolt, sea coral and lots of other things basically all have the same shape. In Rijks I came across these two old German x-rays of a child’s hands and feet, and straight away thought about that conversation, and how we walk around with what essentially looks like winter trees inside our bodies.

Crazy.

Loved these linocuts too, but sadly I don’t remember the name of the artist. All I know is that the man in the left hand picture was the one who made them, and that the man on the right was his son, and the woman below his wife. He was a Jewish artist who tried to flee with his family in WW2, but they got caught and sent to be a concentration camp, and did not survive.

Just before we called it a day I spotted this stunning landscape

and this little domestic scene. So there you go, a little snapshot of my version of the Rijks spring 2022. If you want to have more of a dig around the collection you can do so here. It’s really well put together.