Artist Rufus Ketting recreated a mural from the famous Belgian comic strip Gaston Lagaffe (known in Dutch as ‘Guust Flater’) because he liked the idea of paintings that could wreck important business deals.
Created by Belgian comics writer and artist André Franquin in 1957, Gaston Lagaffe works at French-language comics publisher Spirou in Brussels whose ultimate goal is to sign contracts with the rich Flemish Mr De Mesmaeker, seen here running away, as he often does. Prunelle (crying at the desk) is one of Gaston’s bosses, always desperately trying to get those contracts signed.
The mural can be viewed at Frank Taal gallery in Rotterdam until March 12.
This is what you get if you dangle a camera off a kite over something like a vineyard or a tree nursery. Says BLDG|BLOG:
Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter recently got in touch with an extraordinary series of aerial photographs called Baumschule—some of which, he explains, were taken using a camera mounted on a fishing rod.
The series features “32 photographs of tree nurseries and grid forests in the Netherlands.”
De Ruijter first tried to find geometric patterns in natural landscapes, but later switched to “the hyper-artificial landscapes of tree farms and nurseries in the Netherlands”.
De Ruijter’s work is currently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
The past years these depictions of angry gnomes have been popping up all over Utrecht, and now people are comparing the artist’s work to that of the Keith Haring.
The artist goes by the name KBTR, ‘kabouter’ with the vowels taken out. Kabouters are a type of gnome typical for the Netherlands which look like garden gnomes or like original depictions of leprechauns, i.e. fellows with pointy hats and long flowing beards but not to be confused with “hipsters” or “freds”.
As the video shows, one guy managed to get two private kabouters by leaving a couple of crates of beer and a mention of when he would be away on holiday at a local bike shop. More of KBTR’s work can be seen at streetfiles.org. To me, the kabouters of KBTR have a distinct likeness to Belgium’s angry cartoon gnome Kabouter Wesley.
Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 1:11 pm
Kunstenares Tinkebell (Katinka Simonse) has been found not guilty of mistreating 95 hamsters. Back in 2008 the Society for the Protection of Animals and the police raided one of her exhibitions to free dozens of hamsters. The hamsters should only have been stuck in their balls for 30 minutes (apparently recommended) and in this case were stuck in them for four hours.
Since the judge and an Artis zoo vet could not determine whether the hamsters where in danger or not, Tinkebell got a fine of 950 euro, with 450 euro as a ‘suspended fine’. The gallery owner is also in the clear.
While 24oranges crew is slowly getting ready for the holidays (traditional food and poker with people of five nationalities and three continents), enjoy this 14-minute legendary documentary from 1962 about artist Karel Appel entitled ‘De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel’ ‘(The reality of Karel Appel’) by Dutch journalist and filmmaker Jan Vrijman.
It was filmed in France and has some French in it at the beginning, with Dutch commentary by Karel Appel himself and an English translation. It also features music by Appel himself and Dizzy Gillespie.
Amsterdam designer Heleen Klopper who won the Doen Materiaalprijs back in 2009 for her system of mending holes in wool called ‘Wolplamuur’ (‘Wool hole filler’) has recently been included in Time Magazine’s The Best 50 Inventions of 2010. She had no idea she would be included and found out because people told her.
Watch the video with Heleen showing you how it works. It’s basically about filling up a hole with extra wool fibres using a special needle. I could use this product because I recently found a hole in a green wool skirt I really like.
Artist Marte Röling (often misspelled Martha) has a Lockheed F-104 starfighter in her garden in Uithuizen, Groningen that apparently has to be removed if she hasn’t removed it already. Although it has been sitting there since 1989, some boffins at the Ministry of Defense now think it could be slightly radioactive. Röling received the starfighter as a long-term loan art project. This reminds me of some Peter Tooms in Schoonloo, Drenthe who has a Russian MiG in his yard, although maybe it has been removed as well.
Back in 1976 Prince Bernhard (husband of Queen Juliana) cashed a US$1.1 million bribe from American aviation company Lockheed to ensure that the Lockheed F-104 would win out over France’s Mirage 5 made by Dassault for the purchase contract. Long story short, Bernhard refused to admit it, but after his death in 2004, it turned out to be ‘highly plausible’, but I don’t know if proven is the right word. Lockheed deposited large sums of cash into an account of some guy called Victor Baarn, a person that could never be traced. Co-blogger Branko tells me that Dutch comic strip artist Martin Lodewijk has been milking that story for ages, as in almost every Agent 327 comic book (a character loosely based on James Bond) the secret identity of Victor Baarn threatens to come out.
Filed under: Art,Religion by Branko Collin @ 12:02 pm
Sculptor Ton Mooy has revealed to Omroep Brabant that he is a working on a statue of an angel with a cell phone. (Photo and video)
The angel is to replace a worn out statue in the cathedral of Den Bosch. The cell phone will have just one button: for a straight line with God.
According to Mooy, he also wanted to give the angel jet engines, and a skirt instead of pants, but those ideas went too far for the church’s art committee, NOS Headlines reports.
The photo book series In Almost Every Picture by ad agency Kessels Kramer show pictures taken by amateurs that focus on the same element again and again.
In the ninth edition, a badly lit black dog is the subject of the camera’s attention. The product site doesn’t say who the photographer is.
The series is very funny because the dog is black and the quality of the Polaroids is low, so most of the time you just get to see a black blob. Apart from producing picture puzzles, such as this one where the dog almost disappears in the shade, the series also produces a window on a time and a family.
A perhaps more famous episode of this series is the woman at the shooting gallery. This is the sort of photography that made Hans Aarsman quit photography altogether, because he realized that as a professional he could never attain this level of authenticity.
Today, 20 November 2010, is the day that ‘The Netherlands screams for culture’ (Nederland schreeuwt om cultuur), a movement among the general population to campaign against the huge budget cuts in culture subsidies throughout the Netherlands.
Big whoop? Why can’t all those venues and orchestras make their own money and stop sponging off the government? As a North American used to ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ when it comes to culture, knowing that some venues (actual businesses) are subsidised up to 40% (!) is hard to fathom. And if you pull the plug on their grants, entire smaller cities will have no cultural institutions to speak of. But is that such a bad thing?
While there are all kinds of scandals involving cities pumping millions into local, bankrupt football clubs, the arts will not only suffer budget cuts, but the price of tickets for shows in 2011 will be taxed at the 19% VAT (valued added tax) instead of the current 6% rate. Theatre producers are going to the mat with the government, as the decision was made on a whim and will probably costs thousand of jobs. Interestingly enough, sports events will still be taxed at the 6% rate.
The idea behind this logic is politically motivated: One of the recently elected political parties pushing for this want to punish ‘left-wing, artsy-fartsy voters’ and coddle their ‘not as highly educated, right-wing, white, Dutch voters’, also referred to as ‘Henk and Ingrid’, The Smiths if you will, you know, regular Dutch people. Henk and Ingrid are much more inclined to go to a football game than catch Stravinsky’s Petrushka at the ballet.
On October 26, directed by Jules Buckley, an orchestra of some 150 musicians jammed out the Mambo from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. I can’t imagine Henk and Ingrid hate this so much they would want the government to pull the plug on all our major, award-wining orchestras, which is actually scheduled to happen.
Here are members of the Dutch Radio Orchestra and the Radio Choir staging a flashmob at The Hague central station against the Dutch government’s plans to scrap the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Center (MCO).
Sculptor Ton Mooy has revealed to Omroep Brabant that he is a working on a statue of an angel with a cell phone. (
The photo book series