On Vacation in Spain

I have been on vacation in Spain, gathering inspiration around every turn. I spent a week in Barcelona, then a weekend in Cadaques, and now I'm in Madrid. For the first two days in Madrid I was ill, but I have made a full recovery and yesterday I was up for exploring Madrid.

While in Madrid, my husband and I are staying with a wonderful Icelandic couple who are here for the same reason we are. He is going to the meetings with Chris, and she and I are having fun exploring. Yesterday we had breakfast at a cafe by the metro stop nearest to our apartment. The fresh squeezed orange juice was divine, as always! Then we wandered around Parque de el Retiro and paused to sit on the grass and draw and paint el Palacio de Cristal as she read a book (1984 in Icelandic). It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon!

 

Then we went to Reina Sofia, the modern art museum, where I nourished my soul visiting Calder and Rothko and Picasso and van Gogh and Klee, etc. etc. ...  I met a new favorite, Lumière, through the hand-colored 1899 silent films called Serpentine Dance. I found a video online. If you don't want to hear someone talking about it and just want to appreciate the beauty, mute it. :)

Shot and hand-colored - frame by frame - at the end of the 19th Century. Still captivating today, but just imagine what it must have been like to watch an image move and transform like this in 1899! A beautiful example of the earliest cinematic ART.

I watched this over and over as it looped on the wall of the gallery. The collection had to do with visual art as poetry, and I understood it so well as I watched her twirl. Also, I want a dress like that. :)

Hope you have a great day! Remember to twirl! :)

April Project: Day 22

Today I painted a dala horse with gouache. It was really fun! First I painted the red horse, and then I decorated it, so it was the same process as with a real dala horse, only flat. :)

I hope you like my little red dala horse. I'll be back tomorrow with something new for the first day of summer (or what they celebrate as the first day of summer in Iceland). Yup, it is a holiday tomorrow. The first day of summer. And there is snow in the forecast. :) Summer in Iceland!

April Project: Day 14

Hi, friends! Happy Tuesday! Today I painted with gouache onto a swatch of indigo watercolor I'd painted a while ago. The way the watercolor dried made me think of a winter scene, so I started to paint a winter scene. I know that the arctic fox would be more appropriate for iceland, but the red fox looked so much better against the snow. :)

I hope you have a great day! I'll be making something new tomorrow, so feel free to visit again! :)

April Project: Day 9

Hello, friends! Today I had some more fun with gouache. I decided to paint a little scene that would incorporate a lot of things I love, like hedgehogs, birds, mushrooms, inchworms, moss, berries, greenery and flowers. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I used a pretty small brush, but not my smallest brush, and I was able to get quite a bit of detail into it. The painting is just a wee bit over two inches in diameter, which somehow makes it seem even more precious to me.

Because my scanner is not working very well at the moment, and my nice camera is en route to Iceland after being fixed abroad, my phone's photos will have to suffice. :)

Tomorrow I will have something new to share, though I don't yet know what it will be, so check back soon. Thanks for stopping by! :)