Looking at art

Since I’m going to be moving into my very own flat soon I thought it might be nice to have some proper pictures to put on my walls, rather than the slightly childish posters I’ve had up to now. Specifically I wanted to see if I could find anything by the artist Rosina Wachtmeister who I discovered just before Christmas. You can take a look at her website here if you wish. She mostly paints slightly surreal things in ridiculously bright colours and seems to be obsessed with cats. I’m not too fond of cats myself, but I do like a bit of ridiculously bright coloured art, so this afternoon I thought I’d do a bit of googling and see if I could find any non-cat Rosina Wachtmeister pictures to beg people to buy me for Christmas. In this process I found myself on the website allposters.de (there’s a UK version as well, but the German one is where I ended up). Here I found Regina Wachtmeister, but I also found a few other things that I have now decided I must own one day. The Regina Wachtmeister one I want, called Red Cheek, is here by the way and I will definitely be buying it once my wages go in at the end of the month.

Now, my taste in art is not exactly what you’d call normal. I like bright, I like sunny, I like hearts and stars and rainbows,  I like pictures where things are not exactly the colour you’d expect them to be (bright red buildings, red and blue cats, purple unicorns. Oh yes! Bring it on), I like Tomi Ungerer (illustrator of Flat Stanley those of you that remember the book). Here are just a few of the pictures I’ve come across today that I now really, really want (Click on the name to see the picture on allposters.de):
Celebration II by Sophie Harding – Three orange flowers on a purple background. Very cheerful
Slipper Tub by Paul Brent – A picure of a bath tub with a pillow for your head and a plant standing behind it. I want to hang this in my bathroom
Sunflowers by Will Rafuse – Three bright sunflowers on a blue background. I love sunflowers – they’re such a happy flower!
Love Letters in Yellow by Anna Flores- Squares containing various different hearts on yellow backgrounds. It looks much nicer than my description makes it sound!
Easy Listening by Rosina Wachtmeister – Two cats looking out of the window on the left. On the right the outline of a piano with music sheets seeming to drip down the side of it. Go and look, my description really doesn’t do it justice.
There are more but I won’t bore you by listing every single one. I’m sure by now you get the picture.
I also bought myself two prints because they were in the sale and going for incredibly cheap.
Mesa Cactus by Paul Brent for only 1 euro and 58 cents, reduced from €5.90. How could I possibly resist? And Mocha by Sophie Harding, originally €9.90, now reduced to €2.98. Again, how could I possibly resist?

I now wish I was a) rich and b) lived in a big house so that I could spend all day finding art online and buying it for my walls. Of course, I would have to do this in between buying books for my library (I am going to have a library one day. Not a lending library – the kind of library you see in old house. You know, with books all around the walls, a huge fireplace for warming yourself in front of and a nice sofa to snuggle up in while you’re reading. My idea of heaven!).
So, which artists do you lot like? Tell me all about your favourite paintings so I can go and check them all out and add even more things to the list of stuff Bev wants but has neither the money nor the space for. You know you want to help me in this mission 😉

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Beautiful day

It’s been a beautiful day today, one of those that makes me realise autumn isn’t such a bad season after all. It was lovely and sunny and so warm, but not in a ridiculously boiling sun-stroke causing manner like it was back in August. Fabulous.

I stayed at Jan’s last night, which is why I wasn’t able to blog. My boyfriend is a computer scientist with no computer. Madness! We went to a furniture shop just outside Karlsruhe and Jan finally ordered a sofa for his flat. Yay! No more sitting on uncomfortable kitchen chairs. I can actually curl up and be comfortable while we’re watching TV… provided we can get his flat mate out of the way for long enough that is.

Today we’ve been to see a football match. I’m not a huge fan of football but I don’t mind it, so when Jan’s friend managed to get three tickets for the local footbal team, Karlsruhe SC, I said I would go along. They were playing against Wolfsburg. The first half was incredibly boring and if it hadn’t been such a nice day I would have regretted saying I would go. Things picked up a bit in the second half though and the final score was 2-1 to KSC. Towards the end Karlsruhe’s goalkeeper, Markus Miller, got injured. Fairly badly it seems . at least after a failed attempt at standing he was carried off on a stretcher! I’m not even sure what exactly happened, even though the action was pretty much in front of our block and I was even looking the right way. One minute a Wolfsburg player was running towards the goal, the next a bunch of people had somehow run into each other and the goalkeeper was lying on the floor. Crazy stuff!

And so another weekend is over. Tomorrow it’s back to work, but only for two days. On Tuesday evening we’re off to Dublin, where we’ll be spending the night in the airport before taking a flight to Newcastle at 6:20 the next morning. My brother is turning 18 on Thursday, hence the trip. I still haven’t actually bought him a present though. Anyone got an idea what to buy for an 18 year old boy? Suggestions in the comments box please…

Pickernicking

The birthday picnic worked a lot better than expected. The sun was shining when I woke up this morning, and by the time we headed to the Schlosspark it was about 23 degrees. There ended up being 10 of us. Everyone brought a little something along – cake mainly, but my friend Lisa brought a salad. And anyway, since when has lots of cake been a bad thing? I made cheese scones, which I had to mix my own self-raising flour for. Can you believe Germany, with its reputation for efficiency and order, hasn’t discovered the joys of self-raising flour yet? They turned out ok though, and ended up being a real hit – Kat has now asked me to send her the recipe for them! So I shall have to translate my copy into German later…

We managed to get rid of most of the food. Including a huge bowl of fruit salad that I was convinced would be enough to feed an entire army. Mind you, Chris ate three huge bowls of the stuff by himself. It’s amazing how much food men can shovel into themselves! I would literally explode if I even tried to keep up.

It’s 5 past 9 now and I’m feeling rather sleepy. An afternoon of sunshine and non-stop eating will do that to a girl. Jan’s gone to install some software at the French centre where he works occasionally, sorting out there computer programmes. Hopefully he won’t be long and we can have a nice relaxing evening together. The perfect end to a lovely pickernicky day.