January 2006 Archives

I am drawing Gerrit Krol for this week's literary supplement. We somehow own a whole pile of Krol's books, Michiel must really like them. I have read some, but not all. I have never been able to read this one, the cover is just too horrible. It is so completely off-putting, I don't know, it just crosses a line. Willem told me about a different book (we skype constantly), I just have to tell you. Not much time though, I won't rewrite and rewrite until every sentence resembles the English language. My parents-in-law had a friend with Parkinson's disease. Hey, Gerrit Krol has Parkinson's too, I could have made an intelligent bridge here. A very alternative friend, he always refused big pharma medication, he's in a very poor state now. He communicates by means of buttons on his wheel chair. This way he dictated his life story to his sister, who self published the book. She gave Willem a copy, and he read it. And what do you know, the guy used to be a drug dealer! My mother-in-law got to know him doing some kind of soul searching course, she had no idea. They always wondered how he could afford to go to Turkey, Afghanistan or Iran for whole summers while living on social security. And owning a second house in France, for that matter. Turns out he had welded a double floor in his deux chevaux citroen. After his drug dealing life, he worked as an iriscopist (what's that in English, I don't think I even want to know). I tell ye, these old hippies...

Deafness. Last week I wrote I was still waiting for one that would be applicable to my kids, and that I hadn't seen one yet. I think I am being punished for that. We are the opposite of deaf. I even have a very peculiar body feature, I have moving (protruding) ears. My ears prick up at unexpected sounds. I can sometimes move my ears at will, it needs a special kind of concentration, but in general it is an involuntary thing. You could say I'm a dog, and that would make this my year, ha! Yesterday as we came out of our house, we were wished a happy new year and a god bless on our own doorstep by a drunken Chinese.

I updated my portfolio, have a look!

We had an educational moment at the dinner table tonight, listening to a classic rock radio show. We actually do those moments, not often I admit, but still. We try to be responsible parents. We agreed to five banning orders. The children are not to become soldiers, not to engage in religion or crime, not to consume porn, and not to do drugs. Fair enough. On a lighter note, dear neighbour Paul got us a front door! Paul keeps finding front doors in the garbage, much to his wife's dismay, who painted the one Paul keeps wanting to replace. I should have photographed the one Paul got us, but I didn't think of it, sorry. It's under a tarp in the back yard now, in the pooring rain. We can't get it into the house before we're absolutely sure there's no wildlife in it. And it'll get stolen if we leave it out on the porch. It's pretty rotten, not even totally sure it's salvageable. A genuine Victorian antique, it looks like it could very well be the original front door of our house. It's a dream in a nightmare condition. A large green glass window, and three small ones red-orange-red on top. With the typical circular wooden ornaments everywhere, and exactly the right size. The mail slot is missing, but that won't be hard to find.

Tiny, tiny, tiny, I know. But I have been promised they'll use the drawings again. They seem to like Annelies and Dimitri enough for a closer look some time. The article is about a revival in Belgian (Flemish) literature, it seems the young Belgian authors show more necessity than the young Dutch ones. I remember that Michiel when he was young and people talked about necessity in art he always used to reply that the only place where he experienced necessity was on the toilet. Anyway, Annelies Verbeke and Dimitri Verhulst, less tiny.

Today is poetry day in Holland. So like lots of other bloggers I'll post a poem. I am not very poetic as a rule, but I'll give you a poem that is somehow often in the back of my head. Ever since I read it, and I don't know why. It's very visual, that might be it. It compares women to marbles. But I won't translate.

Op een gekleurden stuiter

Vaak heb ik aan uw kleur'gen roem
Als op toernooi mijn kracht verspeeld,
O ingesmolten vrouwenbeeld,
Dat een gesteeld loslipp'ge bloem

Zoo dichtbij langswierp en toch zoo
Verhard en onbereikbaar was.
Haar vlag trok spottend heen door 't glas,
Haar lach weerklonk bij ied'ren stoot.

Zoo werden sindsdien vrouw na vrouw
Mij even ongenaakbaar wreed
Als 't wazig beeld in 't glazen kleed
Van paars en geel en vlammend blauw.

Simon Vestdijk

A spoiled brat for the weekly column. I am still waiting for one that's applicable to my kids, haven't seen one yet. Maybe one about bilingual kids, enough interesting things to say about that. In Toronto lots of people are bilingual, maybe even almost half of everybody. Yesterday we had dinner at Mimi's. Mimi lives in our street and runs a restaurant around the corner. Mimi is extremely Canadian. But I heard her speak Vietnamese with her mother, so I payed her a compliment for that. Oh no, she said, don't listen to my Vietnamese, it's very bad. I mix way too much Chinese and Korean into my Vietnamese! Haha, as if I would notice. And besides, to know even one Asian language, but to mix three!

The article is going to be about a bunch of young Flemish authors, so Annelies and Dimitri will be on the same page. I found them drinking together on a photo, so I trust they won't mind. On this snapshot you can see why I don't always like professional photographers. On photographer photo's both Annelies and Dimitri look like very glamourous handsome people. They are pretty enough, sure. But this snapshot shows them much more the way they are, I think. A lot more everyday, anyway. Much more useful to me. So I can make them handsome and glamourous in my own way. This is where I found the photograph.

Anybody out there who might have a decent picture of Dimitri Verhulst for me?

An hour later: I uploaded what I managed to google. It'll have to do, I guess. But you never know. Dimitri, feel free to mail me some holiday pictures!

This is a revolutionary novel. It's the first Dutch novel containing an add. An add for a vaginal moisturizer. I find that extremely funny, such a pitty that according to to review, the book itself is a bit of a disappointment. For a closer look at Renate Dorrestein: click.

Been having a housewife day today. Stripped half a door of its paint and vacuumed the living room, hurray. And an amazing meal in the oven, that goes without saying. Surfing some illustration in between everything, picture above is my best find. I do like simplicity every once in a while. I also chose this picture because I also have been doing what the woman in the picture is doing. I have been making an effort to blow back some life in a squandered mailing list. I love mailing lists. I love to babble away with girl friends while working. It's background noise, company for a lonely illustrator. It started years ago, when I joined a list for parents of gifted kids. But I got fed up with giftedness, it's a terribly limited way of looking at children. For a lot of those parents, anyway. So I always joined fractions of dissidents, schismatists. Rebels against the gifted doctrine. But agitators amongst ourselves, it couldn't turn out well. So in the end, we were left with just four of us. But I did blow back some life today, and now we're six again. And from all walks of life, even illustration. Wanna join? We do write in Dutch though. And we do have to like you.

It is send-your-artwork-to-Eliane week. I realise Epiphany is twelve days ago, but I guess the mail wasn't fast enough. Tjarda & Michiel have a tradition of designing the wildest christmas cards, I should dig in my archives one of these days and make a series. I should have quite a lot of them, Tjarda & Michiel are two of my oldest friends. We are heading for thirty years...

It is not every day that I get a personal greeting from Holland's most famous duck and canary! Jean-Marc sent me his first ever comic album in English, I guess you Torontonians can buy it at The Beguiling. Everybody in Holland loves Fokke and Sukke (yes, the f and s words) but I must warn all too Canadian Canadians that nothing is quite as Dutch - or as funny - as Fokke & Sukke, and they might not have the stomachs for these nice little birds. Although mind you, they are a daily strip in what the "about text" in the album calls "the Netherlands' number one quality broadsheet, NRC Handelsblad". Yes, same one yours truly draws for. And oh yes, almost forgot, Jean-Marc has a blog too.

And hey, most important! Website in English!

This kid is in charge of the household. The parental column does not approve. I don't know, either we are doing something terribly right, or our kids are saints, but there are so many problems that we don't have!

Now in English this little golden book is called "Rupert The Rhinoceros", but since it's election time in Canada, I think Cornelis is more appropriate. I'll explain. Cornelius the First was a Canadian rhinoceros, from Granby, Quebec, who was the nominal leader of the Rhinoceros Party of Canada from 1965 to 1993. The party attracted a considerable number of votes in Canadian elections, sometimes even coming in second place in some ridings, but never elected a candidate to the Canadian House of Commons. Some of their best viewpoints:

#reducing the speed of light because it's much too fast,
#instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada's three official languages,
#building sloping roads and bicycle paths across the country so that Canadians could "coast from coast to coast",
#abolishing pumping oil out of the ground as that oil is there to keep the earth moving smoothly on its axis and if you withdraw the oil, the whole thing will grind to a halt,
#making bubble gum the national currency, so that it could be inflated or deflated at will,
#as an energy-saving idea, putting larger wheels on the back of all cars so that they will always be going downhill,
# declaring war on Belgium because a Belgian cartoon character, Tintin, killed a rhinoceros in one of the cartoons,
# offering to call off the proposed Belgium-Canada war if Belgium delivered a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to Rhinoceros "Hindquarters" in Montréal (the Belgian Embassy in Ottawa did, in fact, do this),

Much more on the Wikipedia page where I stole all this from.

This is a raving review of Hans Munstermanns "novel of manners" (had to look that up) about the fifties in Amsterdam. After reading the review I really felt like reading the book. But then listening to a radio interview with Hans, I heard him say things like "naar mezelf toe", and "vijftiger jaren". Language like that immediately spoils everything for me. Here's a taller Hans.

We have bought ourselves a new digital camera. The old one was dying, we ended up only using it hooked up to an outlet, batteries didn't do anything anymore. And downloading pictures took hours. So now there's the new one. And I have to become friends with it with Michiel not around, figuring things out on my own, with nobody getting impatient about my stupidity. Nobody except myself that is.

Also literature, but different newspaper. I did this drawing under no easy circumstances. When I went out to buy bread, I met my neighbour Jeff. My neighbour Jeff who has played in a film along side Nicole Kidman, mind you. He told me he has a platinum credit card. And that he found out that this thing accumulates points. And that he had 80.000 of them. So now he suddenly had all sorts of coupons. And he was just on his way to spend a 200 dollar coupon on lunch. And would I care to join him. Why of course! In my oldest T-shirt and my Value Village jeans, eating smoked salmon and drinking white wine, and listening to a pianist playing the theme from Love Story. I had to really reset my mind for this drawing. Look at the growing series!

We can play a game. What is the last name of Hans? He is a Dutch author. NRC editorial desk excluded from participation. Competition will end Thursday night, original drawing is first prize.

Next author already. Been struggling for the better part of the day, sketching towards an idea. But it came to me. I am going to subtract 40 years of his age, it will suit the plot of his new book. Ha! He'll be pleased. My editor has to agree first, but I trust he will.

Remember my Voltaire drawing? Then you'll probably understand how pleasantly surprised I was when I found the Voltaire portrait above, in the book I bought this afternoon. This is not a real letter by Voltaire, Ferdinand Bac wrote and illustrated it in 1912. And I also bought some Vitamin D, essential for my keeping up with what goes on in the world of drawing. Almost as normal as Viagra, one could say.

In a while, the weekend-erection pill will be just as normal as the vitamin pill. Lucky me, I don't even take vitamin pills. But if this isn't the most beautiful newspaper page you ever saw, I am going to eat my hat. And I'd better not, because I'll need it today, it's snowing. Erected version here.

I am not completely satisfied with my own accomplishment here, but hey, I made my debut in the literature section. I wish I had been a bit more loose and playful, I will work on that. Black and white needs that, I can't hide behind effectful colouring. Anyway, here's a bigger version.

Of course I have been studying David Levine ever since I know I am going to do this literature thing. Not that even in my wildest dreams I imagine ever becoming half as good as him. But I trust my skills will benefit some from so much exercise.
Only one single Dutch author is featured on this Levine website. Harry Mulisch. Why him? Is he the most famous Dutch author outside of Holland? Maybe. Is he the best Dutch author? I doubt it. I do have a personal theory about his popularity, but I am of course just your average fun shopper in World Literature. I think Mulisch' best seller The Discovery Of Heaven works better in translation. In Dutch Mulisch' tone of voice is so archaic, an old man speaking, and at the same time he is so coercively trying to write a contemporary almost hip novel, I found that very irritating. I hate it when I read a book that doesn't stop irritating me. Mulisch is widely criticized for his arrogance, but his tone annoys me more than his arrogance. And I think his tone is lost in translation.

This furby will accompany a rather moralistic parental advice column in the regional newspaper. But never mind that, my series grows, that is what counts. There seem to be new furbies now, I didn't even know that. Last time around, all the guys at Alias had them. They all stripped them of the fur and had them fight together. They look pretty scary without their furs.

Dirty
you are a dirty ol' man
You can't keep your hands to yourself.
You are a dirty ol' man
Go mess around with somebody else.

Oh, so glad to do colours again, I could sing.

This drawing illustrates a Dutch folk story from the middle ages. And this in combination with erection pills, I am slowly losing my mind, I am not shitting you. I am not good at multi tasking. The old legend has the horse Beiaard saving his master and his three brothers from capture by Charles the Great. On this website you can find the story in English.

I am looking forward to Bob Rossing this one. Roses, yummie. I am multi-tasking though, tomorrow I'll work on my horse with four knights, I didn't even blog that one yet. Colouring roses will be for tuesday. The Silvester party at the neighbours last night was fantastic (again). Bad gift exchange. Everybody is always asked to bring a bad gift they received. And then you get a number and one by one the very attractively wrapped bad gifts are unpacked. But when it's your turn you can also choose to "steal" a gift you like from somebody else, instead of unwrapping one. Now Michiel didn't really have a bad gift, he just packed a pile of fire wood, because our neighbours have a fire place in their back yard. His gift was the largest, naturally. And a little two year old girl chose it. And got fire wood... And then a very nice lady wanted to "steal" the fire wood, so the girl could choose a different present. But she didn't want to give up her fire wood!