Staring at the water, waiting. Nobody understands why
All I want is to see how the rising sun colors the flowers in the ripples of a gentle spring breeze.
'Spring Morning At The Pond' is a new artwork in my collection 'Secret Places'.
Spring Morning At The Pond
General info on this artwork
This is a digital artwork, printed with high-quality ink on museum-quality cotton paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308gsm). The work comes in a limited edition of 10, signed and with a certificate of authenticity.
For these artworks, I start with one or more photographs made by myself. I edit it in multiple process runs and in several layers by color manipulation and adding and editing multiple digital photographic effects. I do that until a surrealistic atmosphere is created that touches me and tells the story I want to tell.
The photograph(s) I begin with has/have an impressionistic, surrealistic or abstract realist style, which is the basis for all my work.
We lie on our backs on a patch of grass among tall trees and look up. All sorts of things are flying through the air. Thick bumblebees and dragonflies, swooping swallows, dandelion fluff, an airplane on its way to a distant destination, gossamer silver threads of a spider, patches of clouds, butterflies chasing each other, a buzzard. Most you only see, some you also hear.
The swaying treetops create an ever-changing light on the ground. The shadow play is almost hallucinatory. Everywhere rustles and everything seems to be moving. With a little imagination, a gnome suddenly shuffles out from behind a tree stump, or a nimble forest elf dances on a branch.
We have been lying here for half an hour now, and the beneficial effect such an environment has on body and mind is already becoming noticeable.
Shinrin-Yoku
Japanese have known this for a long time, and have a name for it: Shinrin-Yoku. The word shinrin means forest, and the word yoku stands for absorbing the atmosphere through your senses. We call it in proper Dutch "bosbaden" forest bathing. For years it has been the ultimate 'secret' in Japan to - now scientifically proven - living a healthier, calmer and happier life. Through Shinrin-Yoku you reconnect with nature in many ways. Consciously spending time in nature can lower your blood pressure, relieve stress and strengthen your immune system. Also, "forest bathing" can boost your energy, creativity and concentration.
Have you ever taken a forest bath?
Healing Forest - The canopy of a Danish forest
Text: Anuscka. Artwork: me
Anuscka wrote the original text in July 2018, just before we moved permanently from the Netherlands to Denmark. She had rather severe lower back pain at the time, but experienced great benefit from meditation in the forest.
This is a digital artwork, printed with high-quality ink on museum-quality cotton paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308gsm). The work comes in a limited edition of 10, signed and with a certificate of authenticity.
For these artworks, I start with one or more photographs made by myself. I edit it in multiple process runs and in several layers by color manipulation and adding and editing multiple digital photographic effects. I do that until a surrealistic atmosphere is created that touches me and tells the story I want to tell.
The photograph(s) I begin with has/have an impressionistic, surrealistic or abstract realist style, which is the basis for all my work.
she lifts the shade, impatient for a glimpse of flight: a sparrow, a swallowtail— something with wings she can memorize.
The above stanza is from Laura Ann Reed's poem "As Clouds Before the Wind", and inspired me to make this artwork. Laura Ann is a poet from the US, her work particularly appeals to me. Moreover, she is a very inspiring woman; I am fortunate to have a regular email contact with her. Read more about Laura Ann and enjoy some of her poems via this link to her website. The entire poem is below the image of the artwork.
'A Glimpse Of Flight' is an artwork in my collections 'Secret Places'.
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A Glimpse Of Flight
Laura Ann's poem:
As Clouds Before the Wind
There are borders toward which she moves, although she can’t say what galaxies they lie between.
Daily, she prepares for a parting in the trees, waits for the window hinge to break, the pane to crack
and fall. She’s ready for the wind to fill her room. She has one foot planted on another planet,
and in her sleep she yields naked to the Eros of its magnetic field— its ethereal embrace. When she wakes
she lifts the shade, impatient for a glimpse of flight: a sparrow, a swallowtail— something with wings she can memorize.
General info on this artwork
This is a digital artwork, printed with high-quality ink on museum-quality cotton paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308gsm). The work comes in a limited edition of 10, signed and with a certificate of authenticity.
For these artworks, I start with one or more photographs made by myself. I edit it in multiple process runs and in several layers by color manipulation and adding and editing multiple digital photographic effects. I do that until a surrealistic atmosphere is created that touches me and tells the story I want to tell.
The photograph(s) I begin with has/have an impressionistic, surrealistic or abstract realist style, which is the basis for all my work.
You ask me why I live alone in the mangrove forest, at the edge of the infinite sea. I smile, I am silent until even my soul grows quiet: it lives in the other world, one that no one owns. The trees bloom. The waves keep coming.
Inspired by the poem ‘I Make My Home in the Mountains’ Li Po (701-762 )
Mangroves, just as seagrass beds and coral reefs, keep coastal zones healthy. Mangroves provide essential habitat for thousands of species. They also stabilize shorelines, preventing erosion and protecting the land — and the people who live there — from waves and storms.
There are many threats to mangrove forests: sea level rise, tourism, land reclamation for agriculture, shrimp farms, pollution from fertilizers from agricultural areas and waste from cities, logging... just to name a few.
The consequences are enormous. Not only because, like all trees, they hold a lot of CO2 both in their biomass and in the soil of the forests, which is released when the forests are destroyed, but also because they house very fragile ecosystems that are lost when the trees disappear.
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Living In The Other World
General info on this artwork
This is a digital artwork, printed with high-quality ink on museum-quality cotton paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag® 308gsm). The work comes in a limited edition of 10, signed and with a certificate of authenticity.
For these artworks, I start with one or more photographs made by myself. I edit it in multiple process runs and in several layers by color manipulation and adding and editing multiple digital photographic effects. I do that until a surrealistic atmosphere is created that touches me and tells the story I want to tell.
The photograph(s) I begin with has/have an impressionistic, surrealistic or abstract realist style, which is the basis for all my work.
I have the right to fly To grow, to prosper The right to be To raise offspring To feed you and others To be fed myself Who defends our rights?
Does a human being have more right to a clean earth and a safe and healthy life than a bird, a tree, a flower?
If your answer to this is "Yes," then why?
Hasn't that human being forfeited that right by polluting the earth, by risking his health through bad eating habits and by using year after year more than what the earth can provide?
Does a Western person have as much right to it as a person in a developing country who has never been guilty of that unbridled consuming, polluting and unhealthy behavior?
Right or Favor?
Do I have a RIGHT to live in a healthy environment? Or is life a FAVOR of nature, which I may enjoy as long as I behave nicely and don't make a mess of my body and my surroundings, and that of people around me and people far away?
I can get terribly irritated by the cries of Western people about their rights. Right to clean air, right to clean water, right to healthy food, right to... In my opinion, we in the 'developed countries' have long since forfeited all our environmental rights, and yet we continue as if the amount of available rights for us can never be exhausted.
Wake up, it's long run out. There is no clean water anymore, no clean air, no clean fertile land. Your rights, my rights, they all stop, where and when we abuse the rights of nature.
We spoiled children, we must earn our rights for today and tomorrow and the rights of humanity in the future. By sustainable living, by consuming significantly less, by cleaning up what we ourselves have polluted.
Right To Fly
'Right To Fly' is a new digital artwork in my collections 'Stray Birds' and 'Digital Art'.
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
Sun and rain have done their work Barnacle geese dance above the fields The harvest has begun
August heralds the beginning of the harvest season. In practice, we have been harvesting in our vegetable and fruit garden for several weeks, but the farmers around us are now gradually beginning to harvest the crops as well.
It feels to me like the beginning of the end of the growing season. It is not yet autumn, or in my words, nature's rest period has not yet begun; in fact, it is the busiest time of year for food-growing humans. But nature's task is almost over for this growing season, the fruits can be picked.
And in recent days we have seen the first flights of geese pass by, shuttling back and forth between the nature reserve where they spend the night, and the fields where harvesting has taken place, feeding on the scraps left by the harvesters.
Have they sensed that harvest time is beginning, and there is plenty of food for them? I think so...
Harvest Dance
'Harvest Dance' is a new digital artwork in my collection 'Wavy Fields'. The photo of the fields in front of or house, which is the basis for this work, is made by Anuscka.
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
An autumn walk on the beach of Schiermonnikoog, one of the Wadden Islands on the north coast of the Netherlands. The weather is stormy, the waves break with large foam heads.
A digital painting, made of a photograph I made in 2011 on the beach of the island Schiermonnikoog, the Netherlands. Three digital layers melted together. Each of them ach with the same photo, two of them edited with color and texture, one with the original photo.
Autumn Sea
This is a digital artwork, available as archival pigment print. Printed with high-quality ink on museum-quality, acid-free cotton/rag paper (Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Ultra Smooth 305 g/sqm). The work comes as a Limited Edition of 10, signed and with a certificate of authenticity.
For these artworks, I start with one or more photographs made by myself. I edit it in multiple process runs and in several layers by color manipulation and adding and editing multiple digital photographic effects. I work on it until a surrealistic atmosphere is created that touches me and tells the story I want to tell.
The photograph(s) I begin with has/have an impressionistic, abstract or abstract realist style, which is the basis for all my work.
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
Yesterday I climbed up the hill But halfway there, the wind and fog made climbing hard The grass slippery with moisture, and smelling of spring A song helped me to continue on my way Once at the top I used the moss as a pillow while the voices of the wind in the trees soothed me to sleep.
Last Thursday morning Anuscka and I were intensely enjoying our introduction to Vietnamese coffee. We only drink 1 cup of coffee a day, so when you taste a fantastically beautiful coffee for the first time, you enjoy it with very small sips. When my cup was empty, I looked, as always, at the "markings" the coffee grounds had left on the bottom. I grind and brew my coffee by hand, pouring it through a metal mesh filter, so there is always some sediment in there. Mmmmmm.... 🙂
The 'drawing' I saw fascinated me, and inspired me to create this artwork.
Inspiration
It is a great pleasure to mention here the 3 inspiring women who, without knowing it, participated in this creation. If you don't know them yet, visit their profile on LinkedIn and read what inspires them. Very worthwhile !
Niloofar mahafel, a wonderful painter from Iran, who trusts me to be her representative AND sent me many photos of the wonderful Iranian landscape. They are a huge inspiration ! No doubt she will recognize the picture of one of her beautiful landscapes in this artwork.
Daphne Nguyen, she introduced me to the coffee coming from her company's coffee farms in Vietnam. Anuscka and I love this coffee, the passion she and her colleagues have for coffee and the enormous commitment to the coffee farmers. I'm sure she never expected that her coffee would become the basis for an artwork...
Karina Mosser, a wonderful painter and a great person to work with. Recently she made a series of abstracts for me to use as background for my digital creations. Through a green abstract painting of hers, I managed to create a work that brings together Iran and Vietnam as a landscape for my "coffee tree".
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
A bright morning arrives fresh and new Pine trees lean toward the first kiss of light We walk together among the trees as the sun climbs into a warm spring day
Go for a walk early in the morning and keep your eyes open for that first kiss !
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First Kiss Of Light
'First Kiss Of Light' is a new artwork in my collection ‘Secret Places’'.
Through my artworks I ask you to reflect for a moment on the nature around you, on the beautiful feeling that nature can evoke, on what we lose when we continue on the destructive path of ever more…
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