BG 305 – Autumn Ground
Abstracte aquarel met herfstbladeren op de grond.
Abstract watercolor painting with autumn leaves on the ground.
leaves
BG 304 – Magpies
‘Tjakketjakketjakketjak, gjew gjew. Hey Kjew!’
‘Yes Kai?’
‘Shall we see if they’ve refilled the water yet? Tjakketjakketjakketjak, gjew.’
‘Yeah, let’s do that.’
They leave their tree branch and fly closer to the house.
‘Gjew, gjew, look, there’s that loser! Hahah!’
‘That lion, you mean?’
‘Tjakketjakketjakketjak, gjew, gjew. Yes, hahaha, that Leo cat! Do you understand why his people called him a lion?’
‘No idea.’
‘He’s not exactly as brave as a lion. Come on, let’s tease him some more! Gjew, gjew, tjakketjakketjakketjak.’
They fly over Leo’s head in quick succession. The tomcat runs away in fright and hides anxiously under the table in the corner where his water bowl stands.
‘Gjew, gjew, hmmm, nice water! It’s good that those people refill it in time.’
‘You do know they do that for that Leo, right?’
‘Yes, of course, …
BG 303 – Autumn Trees
Aquarel met drie herfstbomen.
Watercolor painting with three autumn trees.
BG 147 – Autumn, autumn, what do you have for sale?
Way back in the 1960s, when I was in kindergarten (in the Netherlands), we learned a song that I still hum silently every fall. It goes like this:
‘Autumn, autumn, what do you have for sale?’
Weird question right? So even back then we were preoccupied with commerce.
‘A hundred thousand leaves in a heap.’
One hundred thousand was synonymous with ‘many’. Looooots of leaves in a heap. Or actually several heaps. Heaps that didn’t last long, because, so it goes on:
‘Bags full of wind.’
Bags full of wind? Bágs full of wind? It seems to me that the writer of the text really lost it here. You sometimes bagged those leaves to carry them away, but the wind wasn’t bagged, was it? Whether the songwriter meant garbage bags or the pockets of our jackets or trousers, there was no wind in it.
The wind blew freely around us, almost blew us upside down, roared around our house at night, tousled our hair, made our eyes water and our noses run. But wind in bags? I don’t think so.
So: ‘Bags full of wind …