Took the family to  visit Barcelona  - eldest girl has been  living there for a while and had lots and lots of things to show us. On our first day we ambled through town  - pics were taken at the famous Rambla – and I scouted for places to make street games and circles happen ( I took bird feed with me on the plane: be prepared is my second name). Barcelona is fun! We chanced upon an impromptu dance party in a small, sunlit square.  Live jazz music and ballroom dancing: nice!

Tomorrow we’ll rent scooters and do a Gaudi tour. Also: nice!

Somtimes art and life come together – as they did friday last, when my main man celebrated his 51th birthday in a special way. We used to live in Delft, and he’s been inviting people for years to be at Market Square in Delft on friday 11-11-11 at  11 hr 11 precisely – this all rhyming  nicely in Dutch. Me and eldest went and I took my unseparable crayons with me, witness the photo above. Spelling mistakes are not mine – truly: not! – but caused by the algorithm that adds 3 pics together to form a landscape.

And here are some more:

The text became a photo opp. for a lot of people, and an opportunity to speculate about its why and wherefore. Most people thought someone was getting married at 11 hr 11 exactly, which was close enough. Note: text took 1 box of crayons and about 15 minutes to complete.

Eveline from PLAY + ART did a great proposal for the Bronovo hospital in the Hague. We’re going to brainstorm about this offer some more, but  hope to generate interest with this proposal . Check the full proposal here for good measure (it’s in dutch). Pic shows the Big Buddy I blogged about here. Nice to meet some like-minded souls, t0o!

This is the young Aldo van Eyck, a Dutch architect, writer and playground designer I’ve studied for my masters thesis. The van Eesteren Museum in Amsterdam does a retrospective of his work at the moment, it is titled ‘the playful city’. I was there a couple of weeks ago – ran a little late that afternoon so I was not able to participate in the guided walk they organise. Will save that for another day, must go before the end of january for they close the exhibition jan 31th.  Anyway, it was fun looking at Aldo’s work again.

Most stuff in the museum I’d seen before. The replica’s of his play furniture outside were fun, though, a challenge to get some good pics. Van Eyck had the bright idea to make the play furniture very simple and non-moving, as this would fire the kid’s imagination more. A rule I’ve tried to follow: keep it simple. And judging from my experiments: this works!

I’m on a sailing holiday right now – island hopping on the German  coast. A lot of wind, so no hopping to be done today or tomorrow. Time to connect the old  laptop and have a look at mail and weblog. 

Tried to take a holiday from making art and thinking about art - this turned out to be impossible.  The extra eye – the artist’s eye – found three more labyrinths: