Chronicle

Today, I’m starting  a new category of posts, it will be a chronicle of some bits of my daily life. It’s an experiment, I’m not sure I’ll be entirely comfortable with it in the long run. A few weeks ago, I got myself a nasty virus which encrypted every single painting and photo on my computer. I have no access to any of the paintings I did these last 20 years. I am therefore very grateful for this blog where I posted all my paintings through the years. Yes, they are of  medium resolution, much smaller than the photoshop files and have a big watermark all over them, but I could have lost everything. And there is still hope for a decryptor within one year. This blog used to be more personal and then came Big Brother Facebook and nearly everyone saw my posts only through Facebook. Damn… if I leave Facebook, absolutely no one will visit my blog, why would I do that? Well, I did and indeed, I can see in my stats, it is quite deserted. But it’s ok, it gives me a very special kind of freedom. I can jump on the table, dance, and make stupid faces. It is empowering.

I have kept away from my raided computer since the virus. My heart is not in starting a new digital painting, so I’ ve been focusing on other things. One of them is music. Before moving to Norway 20 years ago, I had started to learn the violin for one year, but then, I couldn’t find any violin teacher here on Lofoten so I gave up. Lately, I’ve been listening a lot to some wonderful Norwegian folk music and it gave me the impulse to learn the violin anew. I found a wonderful software to transcribe music, it makes it fairly easy, it looks like this:

It is truly a piece of cake compared to just transcribing by ear. It can also automatically find notes but it is not 100% reliable (it’s still pretty good compared to other softwares I tried). And this is the very special track which pushed me to take up the violin again:

A sallow tree on the road to Steine:
A wonderful girl  lent me her “seljefløyte”, that’s an overtone flute made traditionally from a tube of sallow bark in the spring but lasts just a few weeks before it becomes out of tune. Nowadays, you find them in PVC and they sound just as lovely. But they are pretty hard to play. This is the modern version:

There are no holes, the notes are made by the intensity at which you blow in the flute. But the sound is really unique, it carries me instantly into the Norwegian woods, between mossy rocks and streams of water. This is me playing a bit. But of course, I’m still learning. I also play the kantele, the Finnish instrument, “free style”, I find it incredibly relaxing:

This my kantele, it’s so lovely and it has a name, Gamayun, the wonderful Soul Bird from Russian myths.

I’m also working on the weaving of a cloak. The yarn is Shetland wool and I spun it on my spindle. I incorporated some woolen locks (on all 4 edges) from a farm in the UK, it’s from Wensleydale sheep and it is very beautiful. I had to clean it all myself but the locks are of the utmost quality. I didn’t find any vegetal matter in it, I just had to wash the lanoline away. No big deal. . The weaving should take a long time. Every fourth row, I weave some locks in.

It was so beautiful this morning in the very quiet hours, the water in the fjord was almost still.

The cotton grass is growing bigger by the day:

Theses white dots are a lovely sight:

But let’s take a closer look:

The girls look like they’re made of cotton grass.

When I see these little white flowers, I always think of Theodor Kittelsen’s painting:

Filming with my little crane adds a great smoothness to my video but it is so heavy. I certainly won’t be taking it every time I go for walks:

The ferns are also slowly unfurling. I love their spiral shapes:

The young tips of the fir trees are so soft:

I also saw lots of golden-roots, they are really gorgeous this year. Apparently, their roots have the same effect as ginseng, but I won’t  pluck them. How could I? Look how beautiful they are:

Pixie looks like she’s smelling the flowers. These days, I’m working on a “soul portrait” of her, a wooden diorama, like the one I had made for Lucy:

Lucy’s soul portrait:

My beautiful girl…

Meanwhile, my Soulmate has been baking a bread:

He didn’t forget i in the oven, it’s charcoal and it’s edible,. It also tastes very much like bread.

And that’s the end of my little chronicle. It was a nice evening by the window, writing and contemplating one of my most favourite views ever:

Oh, I almost forgot. Last night, I dreamed of Loki. I was looking for him and I realised he was just behind me. In my dream, I thought “Of course, he’s always right behind me”, it is a very comforting thought…