From H to B

It looked like an installation, the studio in Hull, before I left for Berlin two days ago; everything packed up to one large central block, ready for doing up the space.

Sunday night I arrived here, in the place that I'll occupy for the next four weeks. It is about 13° further east, a journey of roughly 1000km by air, without counting the detour to the airport.

I'm still settling down. The deal is the welcoming charm of this steadily changing and lively city, Berlin, in exchange for the light and green ambience of Hull.

No garden here. I'm living near the pavement, separated from passer-byes, a children's playground and a residential street (leading to a major traffic artery) only by huge shop windows - plus shutters at night. Yet, all I noticed so far is that I feel comfortable.

I took with me a few things to work on. Not sure, but curious, what I will do, since whatever I'll be making, will happen in a different manner; simply because the two cities, H and B, feature such different climes.

Another tree

It looks like finally spring has sprung. The small Japanese cherry tree in the garden is now in its pink-white outfit. The buds have been on stand-by during weeks and weeks of cold weather.

I sniffed a first whiff of mild air in Berlin a week ago. To prepare a month of living and working in the studio of a friend I stayed there a few days. I'll occupy Marion's studio in May while she is abroad.


Here I had set up the loom to make some 3-d prints using the usual silk- and some polyester-thread which looked perfectly fine. Yet, surprise, surprise ... the 'poly'threads behaved like Velcro, very fine fibrils jamming and clogging together! :-//

I look forward to unjamming the threads in June, with a fresh mind and possibly warmer weather.

A snapshot

... of a page in my notebook. Another cyanotype trial

Deforestation - reforestation...

A couple of days ago I had a go at tidying up the computer. Then on Good Friday, confident that only rubbish was in the trash I pressed this sweet delete button to empty it. I remember the crunchy sound of the process - it took a short moment...

Next thing, I felt a strange mixture of bliss and amazement... The whole iPhoto library magically had disappeared into nothingness! And with it hundreds of tree pics that I've taken over the last couple of weeks, intrigued by the drawings of the bare branches and their signatures in the sky.

Luckily dear Stefan found a program that allows to recover 1GB of images on a mac for free. So I spent Easter Monday browsing through about 37'000 deleted pics (many of them trash) to find the ones I wanted to restore. The images below are about 10% of the now purged tree library.

Thank you, Stefan :-))