Busy Spring, Part 2

OK, Part 2. Picking up where we left off, which was in Oslo or something like that...

All the while, even as we were going on these various trips, we were also working on the renovation of our workshop. As that project creeped closer to completion, we began in earnest to look for metal-working tools. At some point Christina responded to a classified ad for a good-looking belt sander, and when we drove to the seller's location, only a few minutes from our homestead, we were surprised to walk into one of the largest machine shops I've ever seen, boasting the largest lathe in Skåne! 

Kodiak next to the largest lathe in Skåne

It turned out that the proprietor, a really nice guy named Farhad who emigrated here from Afghanistan a decade ago, was selling a lot of equipment, and we ended up buying the belt sander, a plate roller, and a beautiful metal table from him. Not long after that, Christina managed to find an old USSR-built pneumatic power hammer in Lithuania which she promptly painted fuchsia and named Ludmila.

But with all these heavy tools slowly making their way to Spitfire Konstbruk och Smide (the name of our newly-formed business) we were in need of a way to move these tools into our shop. That meant two things: 1) we needed a forklift, and 2) we needed to make a big door in our shop that the forklift could get through, where there was none before. I know that it must be only a small portion of this blog's readership who gives a shit about heavy equipment, but I can tell you that I was quite excited to find this Swedish-built Stocka 3-ton forklift at an auction. 

Unloading my new plate roller

Although it's rated at 3 tons, that fact that it can move the old babushka Ludmila, who weighs in at a hefty 3.3 tons, proves it's a conservative rating. 

It was around this time, as spring started to poke through the gloom, that the waves of house-guests started to wash up onto our shores. The first to arrive - and almost the last to leave - was our dear friend Brian Malley from Canada. Brian spent almost seven weeks here with us, mostly helping us build the shop and the other spaces, but also having fun adventures like bicycling in Copenhagen and camping in Portugal (more on that in a second!)

BRIAN!

I mentioned that Brian helped us build the 'other spaces.' Immediately upon his arrival, Brian, Christina, our friend Kryzs and I transformed a crappy and mostly empty space into a cozy and comfy self-contained guest apartment in only 2 weeks! 

BEFORE

AFTER

The apartment was put to good use; over the last few months we have had the pleasure of visits from Brian, Matt and Richard from Taos, Amy Westphall from Santa Fe, Cedar from Taos, my mom from Greece, and Eileen... also from Taos. 

Once the apartment was finished, we shifted focus back to the workshop. 

The workshop, early in the renovation...

After sorting out the ceiling and walls, the final hurdle was to cut the aforementioned door into the end wall of the building, big enough to move materials and tools in and out. By this time we were joined by Cedar, and all those capable hands made the job a success. 

Brian beginning to cut through the brick wall, and...

...the (almost) finished result.

And the shop today.

Of all the spaces we have renovated in the last few months, though.. the one that excites me the most is probably my art studio. I had been working on this space, slowly and by myself, over the months as time allowed. Once the shop and the apartment were finished, however, Brian and Cedar gave a huge push of energy and helped bring it to completion. I think that, of all the spaces we've renovated here, the difference between beginning and end is perhaps the largest in my studio. 

A series of photos showing the evolution of my studio space. As I write this, I have now mostly moved in and I am so excited to start working in there.  

When the building was finally done, we found ourselves in a strange situation. You may remember that Christina's sculpture, the Flybrary, was purchased by a young entrepreneur in Portugal. The purchaser decided at some point to build a new sculpture park in eastern Portugal, and the primary purpose of Brian's and Cedar's visit to Europe was to help move move the sculpture from the private estate where it now resides to the location of the new sculpture park. My mother had also arrived here in Sweden to look after Kodiak while we were working down south. However, in the weeks leading up to our departure on this scheduled work trip, there were problems with engineering documents, building permits, and equipment rentals, and the whole plan to relocate the sculpture fell apart. Everyone had taken off time from their busy lives to make this happen, and in recognition of this fact the purchaser of the sculpture generously agreed to pay us all almost 50% of what we would have earned on the job. So here we all were, in Europe with pre-purchased plane tickets to Portugal and a little extra cash. As a sort of farewell to Brian and Cedar and a closing of this chapter, we decided to rent a camper van and take a tour of Portugal! The highlights were the beaches...

 and the charming town of Porto. 

Probably the best thing we saw in Porto...

And the series of ridiculous 'band photos' we took! 

After 5 days in the van together we said bittersweet farewells and went our separate ways.

After Portugal, with no more house-guests, Sweden suddenly felt lonely. But there is never a shortage of things to do around here. And even after almost 2 years, we are in some ways still in the process of arriving. I have recently applied for the extension of my residency permit (which is a cumbersome process involving a period of time after the expiration of my first permit but before the approval of my second permit in which I am therefor quasi-illegal here). And, as of yesterday, I am finally the proud holder of a Swedish motorcycle license! It's actually kind of a big deal because, while the test for the car license is offered in Swedish, English, and Arabic, the motorcycle test is only offered in Swedish. I had to learn a lot of new Swedish, but about 10 days ago, I passed it!  My actual driving test was yesterday, which was also not exactly easy, but I passed that too and so now I can ride here!

This entire winter and spring, with all the building and visits, has felt a lot like a chapter in this story of moving to Sweden that we are writing. To mark the end of this chapter, and hopefully the beginning of a new one, we decided to have a party! We invited pretty much everyone we knew, and even with 10 or 15 of our friends not showing up, we still had a little over 40 people come see our new setup. Technically it was a 'shop-warming' party, but really it was a bit more than that. The shop was clean and well-organized, the tools were all out and on display, and the party functioned - or at least I hoped it would function - as a sort of flashing billboard, advertising to our nascent community that we are here, ready to start working, hoping to do cool stuff and integrate. (Or to put it another way, as our friend Benjamin recently did... Now that we've finished the hard work of building the spaces, now comes the even harder work of working IN the spaces.)

Party!

If you find yourself reading this blog and thinking that we must be running out of money by this point, you would be correct. Everything we have done up to this point has been fantastically expensive, and the resources we amassed by selling sculptures, cars, and even our house have now been more-or-less depleted. So yes, it's time for us to work. I have submitted proposals to a few opportunities for building new sculpture; so far none have been approved but I will continue submitting. With the skills and resources at our disposal, there must certainly be many ways that Christina and I can make an income from our own shop, and we are hoping to find those channels before we are forced to take hourly jobs. Speaking personally, I would like nothing more than to make paintings and sculptures and be able to earn a living doing that. Fingers crossed.

Speaking of which, here's some more art...

A pencil drawing done with no visual reference... harder than it sounds!

Another drawing. I continue to be inspired by the structural and conceptual overlap between tree branches and the female body. I recently proposed another sculpture on this theme to a sculpture park in Oslo. Here's the proposal image:

If the people in Oslo reject this proposal, I think I will just build it anyway. This whole construct of waiting and hoping for some curator or another to say YES to your idea is totally fucked. It kills the spirit of the artist, and the art-making. I've made some of my best work just because I wanted to.

And here's a sculpture that I'm close to finishing, which I will likely cast in bronze...

Kodiak and I will be going back to the States on Monday. We will spend a week in New Hampshire with my brother Trevor, and about three weeks in Taos, where we will be joined by Christina. As with my previous trips to Taos, I am not too excited about this one because it feels like a disruption to the flow of things here. But I imagine that, just as I did on my previous trips, I will find being in Taos unexpectedly enjoyable. It's always fun to see old friends and visit old familiar places, and Taos is a magically beautiful place after all. 

If you made it all the way through to the end of Part 2, thanks! I hope to see all of you soon.

Hugs,

Christian

Busy Spring, Part 1

OK, yes it's been a long time since my last post. A little over six months, actually... which is a long time for this blog. I have done SO much in these last six months (most of it with Christina and/or Kodiak) that I have made the unusual decision to split this post into two parts. At this very moment, you are beginning to read Part 1. In a few days I will post Part 2. You can blame this on me... for having paused so very long between posts. I'll do my best to keep abreast of things better in the future! Let's begin...

As of my last post, I had just returned from Rome and we had just begun working on renovating our workshop. Knowing that we would need tools when our shop was completed, I drove down to Berlin in December to take advantage of a good deal on a nice TIG welder being sold by a friend, and I had the pleasure of staying with my old friend Guy and his family. Guy's help in building With Open Arms in Berlin in 2018 was invaluable, and it was lovely to see him again.

Not long after that we escaped the dreary Swedish winter by spending the New Year in Athens with my brother Cles and my mother. 

In Athens with Cles

Cles and his wife Kelly had just welcomed a pair of baby girls, Kyveli and Elektra, into the world! It was so fun to see them! We then in turn escaped Athens for a few days on the Greek island of Hydra. I've written about Hydra before... about how ridiculously charming it is, how unspoiled it is by the modern world. It's really an amazing place. No cars, no roads, just donkeys and cats. So many cats! 

The feeling I had this time was really one of being transported back to a simpler time. There is something that I find so seductive about the idea of living a pared-down, simpler life that I even started fantasizing about trying to buy a house on Hydra one day. Oh well, one can dream!

The simple life

While on Hydra it become so obvious to me (in case I'd forgotten) how much I love cats. In fact we all fell so much in love with one particular cat (which Kodiak named Calypso) that I even started researching how to take her home with us. 

Calypso

In the end, that wasn't such a good idea... but we returned to Sweden with the clear goal of finding a cat for our new farmhouse. My only criteria was that I wanted a black (or dark-colored) cat. After quite a bit of searching, we found a mother and daughter duo who we named Stella and Luna. They are not black... but they're tough little farm-cats and they're a perfect fit for our family.

Stella and Luna

In February Kodiak and I again escaped the Swedish gloom by spending a few days in Oslo, the capital of Norway. OK, maybe we weren't actually escaping any gloom, but Oslo was really fun... full of good museums (really good museums, including a military museum that Kodiak Loved, and a museum of polar exploration where you can wander around on board the actual ships which they took to the north pole a hundred years ago!), good food, beautiful views, and lots of sculpture. In fact Oslo is home to the world's largest sculpture park featuring the work of only one artist, and it was precisely that park which drew me there. Gustav Vigeland is Norway's most famous sculptor, and with good reason. He was fantastically prolific during his long life, and the park which (informally) bears his name and the accompanying museum are full of literally hundreds of monumental sculptures executed by him or by his assistants. Actually the fact that he had an army of assistants tasked with carrying out his designs brings us to an interesting handful of points to make about him. 1) Because he was so well-loved in his native Norway, and because he was working in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century, an era which was characterized by industrialization, optimism, and cultural investment in Europe, he received a tremendous amount of support and assistance from the Norwegian state. This support took the form of financial assistance which certainly helped retain all those assistants, but also resulted in a unique deal in which the city of Oslo not only gave Vigeland an amazing city park to fill with his work, but also gave him a spectacular and huge building in a great part of the city to serve as his home and studio, in exchange for that very same building eventually reverting back to the city upon his death and subsequently serving as a museum of his sculpture. What a deal! I don't think that sort of state sponsorship really happens anymore... 2) The second point to make about the assistants is that, although on first glance it might seem like an antiquated arrangement, especially insofar as the Norwegian state might have helped him retain those assistants, a working arrangement like that is not so different from what we see with today's billionaire art stars. People like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst need only sketch something on a napkin... and then their minions do the hard work of realizing the idea as an actual object. During the construction of Vigeland Park, Vigeland was working in much the same way; he would make a small clay 'sketch' of a sculpture (these clay sketches are all in the museum), and his assistants would execute it in full-scale from granite. A lot of people like to shit-talk artists who work in this mode (and I'm sure there are major disadvantages to being 'distanced' from the actual production work), but it doesn't sound that bad to me!

A few of my favorites from the Vigeland Park and Museum.

The centerpiece of the park... Vigeland's monolith. Look closely to see what the tower is 'made of.' Remember that you can open any of these photos in FULL SIZE by right-clicking (or Command-Click on a Mac) and opening in a new tab. (Not my photo)

2 more sculptures from the streets of Oslo. A diver near the harbor (cast stainless, nice!) and a monument to those affected by breast cancer. The sculpture is modeled from a real person and her story, as detailed on a nearby plaque, was intense.

On the topic of Damien Hirst, on our last day in Oslo I discovered another, more contemporary sculpture park which featured one of my favorite sculptures by Hirst, Anatomy of an Angel. 

The piece presents a medical-style cutaway of an archetypal angel from the Christian faith. By drawing attention to the fact that angels share most of their exterior anatomy with mortal women, and presumably therefor their interior anatomy as well, I think the piece attempts to question the idea that they could somehow be immortal. Or at least that's what I take from it!

While in Oslo we also discovered a really super unusual store which calls itself an 'army-surplus store', but was really so much more. You could buy everything from knives and uniforms to dried insects to animal skulls in there. My kind of place. Kodiak went nuts in there!  

At some point not too long after our return from Oslo I attempted to purchase a genuine Jassans sculpture at an online auction... 

....but the bidding quickly eclipsed my purchasing power... and I failed. Despite all my fascination with Hirst and Vigeland and all the other amazing sculptors of the world, Jassans is my favorite. It's been a few years since I wrote about him, the great Catalan sculptor who I discovered while living in Barcelona, but my love for him hasn't diminished. In the 8 years that I've been a fan, that was the first time I saw one of his pieces come up for sale, and I was heartbroken for days after losing that auction. I've got to figure out how to make some money so I'm ready if another one ever shows up! (Ironically there's a strong argument to be made that one of my best shots at making enough money to buy sculptures like this is just to start making sculptures like this...)

I'll finish up Part 1 with a little update on my own art production. To be honest it's been a busy few months - a fact which will become even more clear in Part 2 - so I haven't exactly been cranking out the work. But back in February I did start a figure drawing group, and that has kept the nerve fibers between my eyes and hands in good shape. You might remember that back in Taos I was enthusiastically involved in such a group, and I figured that it would be easy to find a local one here in Sweden to join. But after a few months of searching, I came up empty... so I started a group. We meet on Monday evenings in Malmö, and I've gradually started to produce some decent drawings. I have lately begun experimenting with drawing directly in pen, which is so much more of a commitment... but also signals, I think, a bit more confidence. Here are a few drawings...

I have more of my own art to share, of a different and slightly wider variety, in the next post.

OK, stay tuned for Part 2 in a few days, in which I discuss our awesome new workshop and all the fun adventures we've had with all the fun people who have visited! It's already written, so I promise it will really happen! 

I'll end with this great picture taken by Cles, in Athens' First Cemetery...

C

ROME

 Yes it's been a long time since my last post. 

I would say that, up until about a month ago, my reason for not writing was that I was so busy with the house renovation. And my reason for not writing in the last month is really just that I have slipped into what you might call a 'hard time'. I won't spend a lot of time talking about having a hard time because no one wants to read about that, but I think the following should suffice: During our first 14 months or so here we were in non-stop trouble-shooting mode, whether it was paperwork or getting Kodiak settled in to his new school or learning Swedish or finding a house to buy or renovating that house. During all that time I was so focused on the task at hand, whatever it was, that I had very little time to really feel what it was like to leave my 'home culture' and jump headlong into this new one. My alienation from my feelings during that time was only exacerbated by a lifelong difficulty I have in identifying and experiencing emotions, even in the best of times. So, when the house renovation finally slowed down and Kodiak showed himself to be adjusting much better in his second year to being here, it was finally time for me to feel just how big a thing we've done, and just how hard it's been. If you liken a person who is able to healthily vent emotion consistently to a pressure vessel which maintains its equilibrium by venting pressure from time to time, I might be similarly likened to a pressure vessel with a faulty pressure relief valve, so that when the pressure is finally released, it's a bit more sudden and intense. Anyway, learning to recognize, experience, and regulate my emotions is an important piece of my lifelong psychological journey, and even though it's not always a fun journey, it's my journey! So there!

_______________________

OK, now that that's out of the way, I think my next challenge will be to streamline and focus what might otherwise be a freewheeling and sprawlingly wide-ranging post. After all, a lot happens when the signposts in life are spaced far apart.

I can see that it's been so long since my last post that we were not even finished renovating the house yet. Here's a great picture from back in the beginning of the renovation, taken by our good friend Krister:

While a renovation like this is never really done, we did get the house finished enough to live in, and we moved in at the end of August, meaning we've been here for a little over three months now. The house is sweet and cozy and is supporting our family well. 

Now that the house is basically finished, we are shifting our attention to the main workshop. 

This is how the workshop looked a few weeks ago... 

...and here's how it looked last week...

... and here's how it looks now. The first big job we are taking on is opening up the space by removing the low ceiling, much like what we did in the house. As of right now, I have stripped about 1/3 of the ceiling down to the rafter beams. 

When the rest of the ceiling is stripped, we will cut out the rafters and insulate the interior of the roof, thereby gaining a much taller space. 

You might remember from the last post that we have three buildings; the house, the main workshop, and the other building. The other building is the one in the middle, and will end up serving various purposes, such as guest apartment, wood shop, Christina's and my 'fine arts' studios (like painting and sculpture), and maybe even one day a gallery or café. The following photo shows one of the upstairs spaces that I cleared out and will one day soon serve as my painting and sculpture studio. 

I'm really quite excited about that, as it will be the first proper (meaning: large enough) studio I've ever had. 

And here's one last shot of our sweet courtyard, between the three buildings, back when it wasn't covered in snow!

_______________________

OK, on to other news (and here's where it could get a little sprawling, but I'll try to keep it tight!)

A few months ago I retrofitted three bicycles - one for each of us - with electric bike kits. Here is Kodiak letting us know how he feels about his new e-bike!

E-bikes are really pretty amazing; they've revolutionized our transport around here, and are especially helpful now that we live a little further out in the country. We can get to Lund in about 25 minutes. Although, to be honest, we haven't been using them much lately because it's too cold and icy now.

A few days before Halloween, Lund hosted the annual "Run For Your Lives", which is a zombie-themed mini-marathon through the city. Basically, runners have to get from start to finish without getting tagged by a zombie. Three tags and you're out. I played a zombie. I think I was born to play a zombie. It was really fun. 

Kodiak and I visited Stockholm a few weeks ago, where we visited with friends, went to a museum which featured some funhouse mirrors...

... and saw this fantastic sculpture, the Orpheus Group, by Carl Milles.

_______________________

I'm having a bit of a love affair. 

With Rome.

I just got back a few days ago from 4 days there with my fellow expat friend Scott. We decided to go... just because we could. For me it was mostly about the sculpture. Scott is a talented photographer and for him I think it was mostly about the opportunities for photography... and the beer!

Rome is sort of the anti-Sweden. Rome (and maybe the rest of Italy too??) has visual density, public art around every corner (most of it from antiquity), and tons of style. It's also well appointed with museums, antique stores, used book stores, and sprawling outdoor markets. Sweden has none of that. At one point during our trip, while strolling through Piazza Navona, I thought to myself "Sweden has no style."* My internal reaction to that simple statement was one of surprisingly strong emotion, which signalled to me that my observations about the differences between Rome and Sweden tap into larger questions about how well I 'jive' with Sweden. I know from chatting with Scott that he feels at home in the order and simplicity of Scandinavia, but I'm not feeling that right now. It occurs to me that it might not be a coincidence that Italy is a place which you might characterize as 'demonstrative' or 'emotional', and in the same loose way Sweden could roughly be referred to as 'withdrawn' and 'intellectual.' I am bored of withdrawn and intellectual, and I'm fucking bored of jantelagen, the informal Swedish rule which discourages standing out from the crowd or touting your own uniqueness. But, whatever. For now we are here... and as I've said before it is our job and our duty to give this experience our very best shot; to try as hard as we can to make it as good as it can possibly be. 

And... Rome (and Florence and Barcelona) is just a short plane ride away.

* This statement is obviously not true. Swedes do have a style, even if it's a bit homogeneous and unadventurous. IKEA is a good example. The more important part here is my reaction.

OK, get ready for a bunch of pictures...

My current favorite sculptor is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the undisputed superstar of the Italian Baroque. Our four days in Rome were loosely structured as a tour of Bernini highlights.

This is probably my favorite Bernini sculpture, called The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. It depicts the moment Saint Teresa receives the awesomeness of Jesus, as symbolized by the little angel about to stab her with an arrow. The sculpture is considered scandalous by some because Santa Teresa's religious ecstasy looks just a little bit too much like sexual ecstasy. That's probably why I like it so much. Bernini apparently had a 'healthy' sexual appetite, so it's not a stretch, in my mind anyway, to imagine that he might have been intentionally riding that fine line between different 'types' of ecstasy. The sculpture is tucked into the side of a smallish church which was right in our neighborhood of our hotel. I went there at least three times. (Picture by Scott. In fact, so many of the following pictures were taken by Scott that I'm just going to use a red asterisk, like this * , to denote them in the future)

This photo is a little out of order in my narrative, but... later in the trip I spent an afternoon perusing some spectacular antique shops, where I saw this marble replica of Santa Teresa's face. Of course I had to ask the price, but... at 6500 Euros, I had to pass!

The church in our neighborhood also had this 'replica' of a saint, lying... apparently dead... underneath one of the sculptures. Not a common sight in Sweden. Actually, not a common sight anywhere I've travelled!

Later on day one we found these open-air used book sellers. I appreciated that you could buy all kinds of books here, from art history to pornography to philosophy. *

We had our first dinner on this square, or piazza. Rome is full of piazzas, and the piazzas are full of life. This one had a good bookstore called Fahrenheit 451 books. *

On the second day we went to the Galleria Borghese, an art gallery in the former private home of a rich Catholic cardinal. The place is full of amazing art, such as 'Apollo and Daphne,' by Bernini, above. In this sculpture, Daphne is escaping Apollo's amorous advances by turning herself into a laurel tree. *

Detail of 'The Rape of Proserpina,' also by Bernini, also at the Galleria Borghese, photo also by Scott *.

Cardinal Borghese was also a collector of Caravaggio paintings, and there were four in this room (three in this picture). If you've been reading this blog for a while you might remember that I'm a Caravaggio fan, and it was amazing to see them in person. Sometimes I can't believe that these treasures of art history, these one-of-a-kind objects, which are pictured in so many books and are so historically important, are just there... sitting there... in a room. If you were sneaky you could probably just touch one of them. *

Last pic from the Galleria Borghese. An amazing little drawing by... I can't remember. But it was great. Most of the time when Scott was taking a picture of me, I wasn't aware of it. I guess there might be more pictures of me in this post than usual, because he took some good ones. Like this one. *

We wandered into another church and saw these sculptures of women, kind of in a side room. As if they weren't that important. But the women were so beautiful. At least I thought so. Sad... and beautiful. *

In the same church there was this quite strange modern bronze sculpture of an angel. *

The river Tiber, looking back at the Vatican.

That evening we just wandered around some more, ending up at Piazza Navona, a huge piazza with quite a few sculptures by... you guessed it. Bernini.

The next day we went to the Vatican, which is....

Flippin' enormous. Over the top. Gigantic. Pictures can't do it justice. *

The first thing I wanted to see in St Peter's Basilica, the main church of the Vatican, was this funerary sculpture by Bernini... *

Check out the bronze skeleton with wings, holding an hourglass, trying to emerge from the red marble drapery. Amazing. *

St. Peter's Basilica is topped by a huge dome, which you can ascend by a series of internal stairways...

As you near the top of the dome's curvature, the walls of the stairways mimic the dome's shape...*

This is the view from the top, looking down on the Piazza di San Pietro, which was also designed by Bernini. Yes, he was also an architect. And a painter. And a theatrical production designer. Jeez! *

Scott and me, up on top of Rome.

On the third evening, Scott went to take some pictures, such as...

... this one of the Tiber, looking back at the Vatican. That's the dome we climbed. That's a damn good picture, right? *

Meanwhile I perused some world-class art and antique shops...

I was hoping to find something I would fall in love with, and that I could afford, and I hit the jackpot when I found this print. It's an engraving from 1895 of a painting by Emile Levy called The Death of Orpheus. In 'the old days,' before photography, sometimes prints would be made of famous paintings so that ordinary (not rich) people could have the artwork in their homes, or a facsimile thereof, anyway. The action in this image is incredible... a sleeping Orpheus is about to be murdered and dismembered by a bacchanalian gang of eleven dressed and undressed women. Now I need to find a beautiful frame for it.

Later that night we wandered through quaint neighborhoods...

... popped in and out of more churches...

and had dinner at a lively little beer place in an area called Trastevere.

On our last day, we wandered more...

... past more sculpture (there really is sculpture everywhere)...

... and ended up at the church where Bernini is buried. As I walked towards the tomb, a church worker pulled a red velvet rope right across my path, blocking me from getting any closer than this!

Had I been 2 minutes earlier I could've walked right up to it. Oh well. A fitting end to an amazing trip.

In this last picture I'm showing off the Italian ibuprofen that kept me going day after day. Old injuries flare up when you walk an average of 25 km per day! Yes, we walked 100 km in four days, an average of about 6 hours a day. *

OK, done with Rome.

_______________________

Our days and weeks here are still pretty well taken up by working on our homestead, but I have managed to do a little art here and there. 

I find the part of a tree where the trunk splits into two to be a very inspiring shape, for its similarity to the human body...

... so I've been doing some wood carving along those lines.

I took the idea a little farther in an application I made to an artist residency in February. This is the concept image. I'll update as to whether I'm accepted. The residency is in another part of Sweden, and I fear my proposal might be a little too... 'corporeal,' shall we say, and not theoretical and conceptual enough. But I think it's great, and I hope to make it happen! I've also been sculpting in clay with an eye towards casting another bronze, but the clay sculpture is not finished enough to show here. 

If you made it this far, congratulations! It's the end!

I have in mind another post, about a super mundane and pedestrian topic which is nevertheless quite close to my heart. We shall see if I can post that one sometime soon.

I hope this finds you all well,

Hugs,

Christian

And... Thank you Scott for letting me use your great pictures!