Who will be the new artists be ...?
Puerta del Sol and the Friends of the Mukha - Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, or Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp - wil announce the news tonight.
My camera and I will be there.
Photographs to follow.
Meanwhile an art work from Caroline Huber, a past winner.
Sarah Neirinckx returned to Belgium after 15 years of living and working abroad. Back home she has begun a coaching practice called Third Culture Coaching. She is focused on providing guidance and support to modern nomads, expatriates, and repatriates.
Sarah explained that her aim is to support the transition processes while encouraging personal growth and development . Most people tend to underestimate the need for support and guidance as they transition from one continent to another after returning home from a life lived abroad. While there are the obvious and practical steps one must take, there is also the little-discussed personal and a psychological impact of returning home. Many professional organisations seem to ignore the probability of culture shock when moving their employees around the world, or bringing them home.
The phenomenon of Third Culture is all about the fact that while people living and working abroad didn't really fit into the country they were based in, they often find they no longer fit their own culture either. People often live within an expat community where they are protected from the full force of culture shock abroad however on returning home they feel the way that foreign experience has altered their personality.
HR, management, coaches, therapists, and psychologists pay scant attention to this issue of third culture issues and it was for this reason that Sarah began Bloom Co-creation.
She works with global nomads, third culture children, expatriates, repatriates, and people who are in a transition phase. She would love to hear from you.
Sarah wrote, We are excited to announce that Bloom is celebrating their launch with a Brenda Davies workshop - Creating the Life You Would Love To Live here in Antwerp, Belgium.
This exciting two-day workshop can either be followed as the two-day, or there is the possibility of attening for just one of the two days. Choose what suits you.
You can read more about Brenda on her website over here.
Reservations, phone Sarah at +32 477758291 or email her at: sarahneirinckx@bloom-cocreation.com
Why yes ... that wonderful smell is coming from our kitchen.
As I write here, downstairs there is this stunning concoction that combines the best of Belgian and New Zealand cuisine, simmering away in the great big pot.
2.5kgs of Pure South New Zealand venison is cooking with a rather special bottle of Belgian beer. There are onions, jenever (juniper) berries, cloves, fresh thyme, a pear and apple syrup-style spread, and bay leaves too.
It's Armistice Day here in Belgium and a public holiday. How better to celebrate the end of that war that saw so many New Zealanders pour into Belgium, along with the rest of the 'Allies', in an attempt to save Belgium from the 'other side'.
I have fresh bread baking for the morning and the laundry is in, after a day spent hanging in biting sunshine.
It's all happening here tonight. I don't quite recall how it was to spend spring, summer and autumn out and wandering. It's fading ...
Oh, liked the look of this documentary by Leon McCarron and Al Humphreys.
In November and December 2012, Leon crossed 1000 miles of the Empty Quarter desert in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The journey began in Salalah, Oman and finished six weeks later in the glitz and glamour of Dubai, UAE. The trip roughly traced some of the routes famously trodden by the British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who criss-crossed the desert in the 1940's.
Alice came to a fork in the road. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go” responded the cat. “I don’t know” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “It doesn’t matter.
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Source: Oh Fairies
It's fascinating (for me) to watch myself struggle with having made space and silence to write ...
I didn't realise quite how addicted I had become to distraction. 'Addicted' for want of a better word. Facebook is perfect as a distraction. It's full of some of my favourite people and, often, it's the only place I easily and instantly reach them. It's playtime all day, if I allow it be. Or forget that it shouldn't be ... on a slow day when I am quite lost and lacking in self-discipline.
And my FB wall was full of interesting folk. It wasn't the tedious stuff you read about in the 'worst of FB' stories. They were posting politically and intellectually interesting stuff ... as well as day-to-day life, links to good music, and their stories too.
These days of allowing this silence to fall around me haven't been simple but slowly I'm growing used to the peace of it all. Instead of multiple story-lines telling of other worlds running there in my head, I only have my stories ... mostly.
The loveliest thing is that I am receiving long emails from friends who have either already left facebook or who want to stay in touch. Long emails are bliss and I find myself setting aside time to reply, instead of them being lost in the avalanche of action that my life used to be. And links to good music are often included. I would hate to lose those introductions to music others love.
Yesterday I was consumed by a desire to further prepare myself for the long winter ahead. Bookshelves were moved, the sofa went upstairs to Miss 9's room, replaced by a exquisite yellow armchair I found secondhand and today this office space/bedroom is so much more beautiful. When the sun angles in through the window behind me now, it is no longer absorbed by the other deep-red bookshelf, instead it reflects off the wall painted a warm terrocotta (I think) and lights the middle of the room with a warm glow.
Light, and that colour range from pale yellow through into a deep gold, they are things that I love. My desk area is clearer than ever, and the small round red patterned rug that we found is perfect under my chair.
The paddling-people delighted me, in the image below, but so did the house. If I had a Pinterest board, I'm almost sure that it would be filled with images of houses and rooms made for dreaming and writing in...
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
Steven Furtick
Source, Oh Fairies.
Whenever I am unable to create my own sense of beauty, I have this book that has traveled with me since the 90's. The date I wrote in the front reads 'pre 1999'. I remember how it saved me when we moved to Te Anau, from the disruption and loneliness that is moving, and that it has saved me so many times since. For me, there is this sense of falling into the beauty that is Frances Mayes prose, like sinking below the surface of a swimming pool, immersed for a while.
Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct. There are places I've been which are lost to me.
I've heard so many angry women talk of Frances Mayes book 'Under the Tuscan Sun' - and make no mistake, I am talking of the book not the movie, which is another story entirely - and these women rage about this book and that woman's unrealistic portrayal of a life lived partially in Italy.
I listen, sometimes I speak up but mostly I quietly decide that they are not lovers of beautiful poetic prose writing ... that they simply lack a dreamy writerly soul. But truly, I'm not sure why I love what they hate.
The outrage ... I would love to unpick it, to understand where it comes from.
The second-floor bedroom that opens onto a brick terrace gleams. They've made the bed with the new blue sheets and left the terrace door open to the sound of the cuckoos and wild canaries in the linden trees. We pick the last of the pink roses on the front terrace and fill two old Chianti bottles with them. The shuttered room with its whitewashed walls, just-waxed floors, pristine bed with new sheets, and sweet roses on the windowsill, all lit with a dangling forty-watt bulb, seems as pure as a Franciscan cell. As soon as I walk in, I think it is the most perfect room in the world.
These are soul-soothing words for me. I once lived in the brick house of a friend who was so good to me when I divorced. It was everything sensible, that borrowed brick house, but my soul needed something else. I found a funny little 1.5 bedroom cottage out on the Otago peninsula.
I moved there and was happy. I would drink my morning coffee out in front of the massive rough wooden-framed windows that made up the front wall of that cottage. My view, a few metres of lawn, maybe 2, a small road just below, and the sheltered water of that beautiful harbour.
I require beauty but mostly it's simple. It's about Nature and good air, it's about views that make you stop and dream for a while. It's about having a dog, when possible.
New Zealand spoilt me in a way. My Belgian bloke understood more of me after our trip home last year. He realised that while I believe natural beauty is a right, he understands beauty is a luxury. He comes from a small country, 1/10th the size of New Zealand. In Belgium there are 11 million people, New Zealand has 4 million.
After a few days, my life takes on its own rhythm. I wake up and read for an hour at three a.m.; I eat small snacks - a ripe tomato eaten like an apple - at eleven and three rather than lunch at one. At six I'm up, but by siesta time, the heat of the day, I'm ready for two hours in bed. Slumber sounds heavier than sleep, and with the hum of a small fan, it's slumber I fall into.
Finally entering into university studies at 34 was one of the best things I have ever done. There was an appreciation of all that I studied, an excitement that I might not have felt back when I was 18. In those days, I lived in 4 different homes along the peninsula. My first husband and I bought an exquisite cottage down there back in 1999. We divorced and I lived in a series of cottages on that narrow strip of land between the harbour and the Pacific Ocean.
Under the Tuscan Sun got me through dark times and lonely times too. It was like a burst from a sun-lamp perhaps. It traveled to Istanbul with me, as one of the few things I could take from the old to the new life. It lives here on my deep-red book shelves in Belgium, a much-loved book that I recently pulled out as these autumn days grow grey and the darkness comes so much earlier.
For me, the book is a meditation on the beautiful moments, written in the prose of a woman who began as a poet and went on with prose. It's a writers book. A book for dreamers and lovers of beauty.
Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor.
