my first print for at.tension! the feminist café collective i belong to is serving coffee there this year. so we’re really excited to create lots of lovely prints to sell alongside our delicious coffee.

i always start with hand-drawn sketches and keep tweaking the layout until I’m happy with the balance between the typeface and the motif. the motif was simple this time, as it’s a variation on our logo.

my favourite plant is a ficus benjamina that has been with me for more than 15 years. Its leaves are good friends to me so they get a little homage in oil.

i hardly ever paint with oil paints (i also never learned how to), but since i still have some old paints here, i would like to learn how to paint with them. we’ll start with a simple composition of leaves in front of the sky. for my taste, it could have more contrast, but i had fun and i feel like oil paint might be something for me!

i painted this picture very quickly, in just three days in my studio. i like how warm and juicy everything looks, even though we are currently experiencing a grey winter.

inappropriately, while I was painting the picture, I was reading mary shelley’s frankenstein. the painting is probably in far too cheerful colours, but when i look at it, i can’t help thinking of the monster from the story, who is made up of „parts“ and leads a lonely and reclusive life. perhaps i call the painting „novel physical“?

I should also really start taking photos with a camera… my mobile phone struggles capturing the colours.

it took me quite a long time to finish painting these three small pictures. the warm bodies are randomly fused together or separated.

i like how they stand out against the white paper and how they are partially covered by translucent leaves. the leaves are a new motif in my fruit paintings. until now, i have tended to paint more bodies that vaguely resemble fruit, but i like the leaves, even if the bodies become more like fruit. i will see where this takes me.

i have prints available for the open studio weekend 🙂 these are excerpts from my paintings printed on hahnemühle paper.

a wonderful friend helped me create the prints, and I am very happy with the quality. I also love digitizing my work and resizing it, such as enlarging individual sections. each print has a run of 25, but there are also unique pieces. for the uniques, we scanned, colored, and printed old drawings. then, I drew on these prints again.

I went to a urban sketching meet up and it turns out I’m pretty rusty, time to practice some more… still pretty fun:)

always keep swimming and don’t let yourself get stressed!

I haven’t done linocut for a long time because I thought I hated it, turns out it’s not true at all.

finally finished this piece and i’m really happy with it!

finding the right balance of color and form took me a while, and for my next painting the goal is definitely: less detail, more broad forms.

but i love how the bodies collapse into each other, catching one another the moment they finally touch.