Scouting south east

Last Sunday we made the ±hour and a half train journey from Amsterdam to Nijmegen, nestled close to the German border, for our first (of, hopefully, many!) gig of the year – Scout Niblett at Extrapool.

The winter sun was shining and with time on our hands before the gig we did a bit of exploring of this new-to-us ancient town (first settled by the Romans over 2000 years ago). There were plenty of good discoveries to be made…

atmospheric ruins

golden light

the hard-working (even on a Sunday) River Waal

black swans, and other plumply perfect feathered friends

trails through the blue

elegant spires, onion-topped towers
(and ducks flying in pleasingly wonky formation)

feisty felines… definitely masters of their domains

winged watchers

a giant bunny balancing a bright red ball on his nose (highlight!)
["Uitkijkkonijn" by Florentijn Hofman]

and Scout…
despite having a nasty cold and feeling very lousy for it, had us all captivated with another goose-bump inducing performance of raw emotional power.

Guardian dragon

A few days ago I received a wonderful New Year gift in the post from my very talented friend Yoko – one of her minutely detailed and exquisitely coloured copperplate etchings, entitled ‘guardian dragon’ (in celebration of 2012, the year of the Dragon).

‘guardian dragon’ by Yoko Hayashi

We’re very honoured to have such a handsome creature watching over us in 2012 – thank you, Yoko!

You can find more of Yoko’s beautiful work on her blog or her Flickr photostream – if you’re in need of a bit of magic do go and have a look.

While on the subject of prints (and dragons), I am close to completing a new series of little screenprints (with the working title “an amateur naturalist’s specimen collection”). The series consists of eight specimens (each in an edition of 13), and some of the critters include hand-coloured details (which has been a time-consuming, but satisfyingly obsessive, process ;). Here is one of them, simply entitled ‘larva’ – he started out life as some sort of crustacean larva, but now that I know 2012 is the year of the Dragon I like to imagine that he might be a very young dragon…

Berlin grafica (part II)

Part II of street art ‘collected’ on a recent visit to Berlin. You can find Part I here >

Osch
(and CCTV surveillance courtesy of ‘the man’ ;)

Interested in other ‘adorned’ urban environments?
Some previous street art ‘collections’ can be found at the following links:
Zaragoza | Barcelona | London | New York | Amsterdam

Berlin grafica (part I)

Astronaut/Cosmonaut by Victor Ash
(and a giant bubble spotted floating over the Brandenburger Tor)

Street art abounds in Berlin, and we came home from our recent visit with a lot of pictures of said street art… I have therefore split the wealth of images across two posts (to keep my future referencing of them, and your current viewing of them, more manageable. Part II to follow tomorrow). As is often the case with the street art images I’ve gathered in cities far and wide I’m unable to credit many of the artists – references have been included below images where I am able to credit the creators.

ROA

BLU

[Contextualising the epic ROA and BLU pieces shown above]

Interested in other ‘adorned’ urban environments?
Some previous street art ‘collections’ can be found at the following links:
Zaragoza | Barcelona | London | New York | Amsterdam

Happy happy joy joy…

… as a certain dim-witted, but well-meaning, feline might say.

Lots of both to all of you!