Fascinations from the childhood

I remember my parents having a huge book (I think it's still there in their bookshelf), bounded in light-brown leather with paintings and drawings from Theodor Kittelsen inside, a Norwegain illustrator/painter with a lot of motives from Norwegian nature and folk-tales.

"Echo"



My first years I would just look in the book, without having learned how to read, and some of the pictures could be really scary, especially those with motives from the Great Plague that wiped out close to 2/3rds of the Norwegian population in the mid 1400.
He had personified the plague as an old lady with a skull-face or as a black owl.
I remember having nightmares sometimes after looking in the book before going to bed...




He is also the man who has set certain standards on how we picture the trolls from the Norwegian forests and mountains.


More information on Theodor Kittelsen

Writings on the wall

Too much time alone can make people pretty creative.
I did what prisoners do to make days go by; wrote on the wall of my cell.
It got pretty fun after a while, like a diary gone wild.
It was in the first apartment I lived in in Lisboa.
Created my own little absurd universe.



My drawings are
usually not well planned,
they just pop up in my
head and form themselves
on the paper, without any large
thoughts involved.

























The quote "As light touches the horizon, we are all a part of tomorrow's dreams",
was something I came up with on a trip around the Greek archipelago in 2001.
It's a small kinda-haiku I've really fallen in love with after that.








I will quote Dave on this part:
"It's the Blimpboat that you can walk out of the sky of onto the ladder and into the Castle that rests in the clouds that are on top of a stained glass Tiffany's lamp that has an anitgravity Jet-propulsion Unit on it! Got it?"









It all started with a mushroom,
and a snail, and some straws,
and then there came a snake,
with an apple on its head.
You can make of it what you like.
It is actually a female snake,
look at the long lashes.









My pack of prairie-dogs
kept me with company
during the cold,
Portuguese winter...

Chalk cliffs of Rugen by Caspar David Friedrich

This is a picture I first encountered in my bedroom of my family's summer estate.
Originally the bedroom was my youngest aunt's, but as she grew old, married and had kids, I inherited the small room on the loft of the oldest house, and by the bed, a small poster of this painting was the first thing I laid my eyes on everytime I went to bed or woke up.
My concerns were always around the man who had fallen over and lost both his hat and his walking stick, and the young lady dressed in red that sort of reaches out towards him. Why did he fall? Or was he just looking over the edge of a steep drop? I imagened the three persons in the picture were in some sort of argument, the two men not seeming interested in eachother. Were they fighting over the red dress lady?
The pictures gave me a lot to think about before falling asleep. The colours of the sea, like in a sunset. The white chalk cliffs that I first thought was snow or ice. As a child I had never seen chalk cliffs before, but could relate to the glaciers I had seen in a distance on top of the Norwegian mountains.
I wonder if the poster is still there.

More about Caspar David Friedrich