winter is coming!

Photos from our garden one misty morning.

paintings of David Bartoň

 I loved drawing and painting since I was a small child, but I really started to paint (more or less seriously) ten years ago, in 2002. In that time, I saw paintings made by David Bartoň, moravian painter, and I loved them immediatelly. At most I love what I call his "abstract landscapes", but he paints also fun portraits of his friends and people he saw in pub. The landscapes are so beautiful, bold colours, optimistic, energic paintings. There was a time (in 2002/2003) when I wanted to paint like him. I really tried, haha, but obviously I couldn´t achieve anything similar (maybe later I´ll show you some of my old paintings, so that you know how much I was inspired by him... I almost tried to copy his style :). I love the squares he usually paints the landscapes on, I love his colours, everything. For a long time I´ve kind of forgotten about him, and didn´t see his paintings anywhere... But recently I started to think about my own "painting journey", how I would like to write about my paintings from the beginning, who and what influenced and inspired me, and why did I paint in the first place. I just began to think about all this in my head and thought about writing a post about this on this blog, but I realize this would take me a long time and some research (and also the actual post would be quite long). It will maybe be a while before I manage to write this. But - today I started to make the research, and I found David Bartoň :). And I have to say, after years and years, and after my vision of what I would like to paint changed a lot, I still love his paintings. Today, as I was looking at his work I actually thought about buying one of them, but since I mostly love the big ones, it would be probably expensive :). I can already see the painting on our beautiful grey wall in the living room... Oh well. (My husband told me there is actually a chance it wouldn´t be so expensive, so... :)
Here you can see his other works, I highly recomment clicking through them.

christmas decorating

I wasn´t much into decorating for christmas and winter time in recent years... but this year I really want some decorations and ornaments around the house. (I know it´s probably too early for this :). I´d love the hang some dried oranges and lemons, some christmassy flowers maybe, straw ornaments, I would like to make some ornaments myself... maybe some birds? I´m also much happier now than I was at this time a year ago. I´m painting like a devil and it´s giving me some great energy :).

small canvases

Recently I had the idea to paint on small canvases and bought several of them. I really like this; painting details, small scenes... It takes a long to paint over big canvas, this is a bit quicker, which is also good. This is the first one (25x30cm), a painting of our last year trip to Italy. I made drawings along the way, inspired by our friend on the trip, who also made drawings of the things we saw during our way. The boys were sitting in the front, and we girls in the back, drawing. From the beginning I knew I wanted to make a painting (or more) with these drawings. That´s me and my friend in the picture.

I fell in love with another house...

...and I love it so much I can hardly stand it! :) Oh my, this building is so so so beautiful. I started to like it a long time ago, and made a painting of it already, but then I found out I didn´t take a good photo of the house - a huge part was missing on the photo. It´s almost impossilble to take a photo of this house, as it stands right next to the road (quite busy road), and there´s no place to park the car. But today, thanks to the internet and Google maps, I found great photos of the house. And I want to paint this house for the second time. Well, in fact, I would like to actually buy the whole house, but it´s practically a pallace, so I don´t think this is possible :). (Not that I have enought money for a small house, haha.) I just think it´s so gorgeous.

I love you, want you, need you, baby!

hotel Hrušov

Finally finished. For my friend who had a dream about a woman entering hotel Hrušov while sitting on a dog and lighting her way with a mushroom :). I changed the scene a bit and made a woman with a pram instead, because my friend is a new mother. I really liked the idea of the mushroom, so I kept that.
Another painting is almost finished and I have some exhibitions planned in January, so I have to try to be a bit quicker with my paintings. It makes me incredibly happy to do this.

larvas

Visited my friend - she has a baby girl one month older than Andulka. She took this cute photo of the kids. It´s so funny how the babies can´t move in their winter overalls. They look so helpless.
Beside A. my new bag! I love it. I didn´t make it... (but it´s handmade!). I kind of gave up at making bags.

Christmas just around the corner (well, almost), and I love that! I look forward to christmas sooooo much! I already bought some presents - I love them :). This year I´m going to give splendid presents to everybody! And in December we also have 10th anniversary of our wedding! Can you believe that? We got married 10years ago! I was such a young bride, you know. If you think of some great way to celebrate this, let me know. I was thinking about doing something crazy, but if not, drinking wine and eating chocolate while watching a good film is also ok. Anyway, our wedding story is an amusing one, I can tell you about that when time comes.

Before sun...

A while ago, I desparately wanted to see a good, romantic, positive, intelligent, interesting movie. I was thinking hard what to look for and then I remembered: Before sunrise/Before sunset could be the one! I´ve read about it few times but it took me long time to actually see it. We saw Before sunrise at first and it was good - an original love story that´s more about talking than about doing anything. Two strangers (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) that meet, talk, walk, fall in love... for one night (in Wienna!).

And then we saw Before sunset, of course. The sequel takes place nine years later after the first one, when the characters meet again (in Paris!). Older, maybe more wise and honest... but definitely with a much better script :). We loved Before sunset, the film was breathtaking, so well made and written. Again, it´s talking, talking about love, life, sex, relationships... but in more dramatic and mature way. It´s all very natural and outstanding at the same time. After we watched it, I had immediate urge to watch it again. It also has a genius ending to it. Great film!

  And Julie Delpy had gorgeous clothes on in this film :). Don´t you love the cream jacket and the black blouse? I would wear both :).

kid´s room upgrades

I wrote it many times before: I love our kid´s (now Marie´s) room. I had big doubts (March this year) if it´s a good idea to move Marie to a separate room which is upstairs, if she´s old enough to handle this and to sleep there. It turned out it was a great idea - she loves the room,  although I have to admit sometimes it´s a hassle to go upstairs to her in the middle of the night when she accidently wakes up. Or when she doesen´t want to sleep in the evening and I have to come to her bed repeatedly (across our bedroom where Andulka sleeps or tries to fall asleep). I admit, it´s complicated sometimes, and not the best solution, but we love the room - for playing and for sleeping, too. It´s huge, cozy, quiet, it´s interesting with lots of nooks and corners.
I made this thing for Marie´s bed - I don´t know how to call it! She calls it a "giant snake" :). There is a gap on her bed between the mattres and the iron bed part (however it is called...), and this gap and the iron was causing several problems. I needed to hide the iron and fill the gap somehow - so I made this long cylinder filled with hollow fibre. Now the bed is comfy and safe. I´m very satisfied with this solution :).

And after I saw the new Ikea catalog I wanted to make an island for playing made from a pallet! With carpet on top. I was lucky, soon we happened to have two spare pallets in our house. We took it to the room, but I had to improvise with the covering, because I haven´t bought the right carpet yet. I used few old small carpets instead, but I plan to buy a new one later and improve the whole thing :).

 

snowy

My husband took this photo of me (or, my behind, haha!) yesterday. Snow everywhere! We were kind of shocked to have snow in October. I have to admit, I don´t really like winter (I´m not saying I hate winter, as I want to have a positive attitude ;-) and I don´t like snow... It´s cold, you know! Haha. The only good thing about winter is christmas... and Marie´s and mine birthday. But! I decided to be even kinder person and find some more good things about winter time and cold, dark weather. Wish me luck!

 

foxes, again

I made another version of one of my paintings, Foxes... for my friend.

here and there...

We´be been to a great wedding of my dear friend Anna. I made white tulle dress for Marie with a red flower brooch. We slept at a hotel with the kids, and Marie loved that.
Andulka turned six moths, she´s so big and chubby now! Unfortunatelly she´s ill, I just hope she´ll get better soon.
We enjoy our new windows - it´s much easier to keep the house warm now. No cold wind blowing inside through the windows this winter. I love how our living room looks.

no cool design...

but I love this room. It´s so cozy and we all like to hang out in there. Photos taken before the window was changed.

finished inside!

Today was the last day of working inside and we could move back. It´s beautiful! A lot of work was also done outside, you can see on the photo how the columns are made with the ornaments on them. Now I can really see how good idea it was to make these arched windows (plus my husband told me today that it was actually impossible to make rectangle windows again, as the building needed to be reconstructed in historically accurate way).

Still a lot of mess inside, but we´re working on it! :)

windows reconstruction: photos

It´s all finally coming to an end... At the moment, the house is covered in dust and full of flies, as the doors are all open, workmen still coming in and out and wind blowing everywhere. We had to move out of our place, which is quite challenging. I can´t wait to go back to our home. Of course, we are very lucky to have a place to stay within the house.
It´s all very fascinating for me... We are renovating the house into its former glory, but are we really (as "we" I mean our congregation)? The photos documenting how the house looked before 1960s are very old and bad quality. We know that in 1961 the windows were changed into rectagle shape, and arches everywhere (there was one also above the main door) were rebuilt into straight lines. It was probably too expensive to keep the arches, and also not in fashion those days (it´s expensive now too :).
Anyway, it´s so beautiful now! Very romantic, those arched windows are really something special. They´re wooden, as the house is a historic building and needs to be taken care of in a certain way, ie. plastic windows are not allowed. I´m in awe at the history that´s behind the house, all those renovations... after you make something, the house looks like it was like that from the beginning. You can´t tell, unless you have some old photos. There are only few. There was a major renovation in 1961, as was mentioned before, that included big interior changes, changing dispositions of kitchen, bathroom etc. There were probably many many changes outside the house... Big step was building the attic, that was in 1980s I guess (before there were no rooms, it was inhabitable).