Living Iron is in production. My bookbinder’s heart is excited: ten years after A Resistible Force I am going from the printing press to the binder’s workshop. The scale and speed of industrial book manufacture cannot be compared to…
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One of my most trusted sources of inspiration: a walk in the park. Today it was even more special with the golden light accompanying the end of a balmy autumn day. The trees are getting old. After a recent storm a centuries-old beech almost fell apart and needed surgery.
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Two years have passed since my last blog post. Two years filled with books and some unexpected hurdles on the way. Meanwhile LIVING IRON, about the rich diversity of iron and the visual appeal of rust, has continued to grow and is now reaching completion. …
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Could it be that ‘it’ was in the air? That we walk around with themes that unconsciously develop in our head until they are ‘ripe’ to be triggered? This morning my eye was caught in the garden by extraordinary cobwebs in the dewy morning sunshine. They looked like solid…
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No time to write long blog posts: I am in the process of giving birth to a book! But my eye continues to travel and this is what I have collected rcently. The brick walls of a small countryside church on Walcheren, in the south-west of the Netherlands:…
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Today I realised once more how any walk clears my head and how little one needs to feel fed. I went out with my faithful companion, the eye of my mobile phone, and before I knew it I had spent almost an hour just watching the bark of a few trees from close…
Read moreThese days I’m reading about the use of iron in early architecture, especially since a group of researchers has found a way to reveal the DNA of ancient pieces of iron, so to speak, in fact a digital identity, by analysing their inner, grainy structure. This has given…
Read more‘The more diverse the life of the mind, the better the chances are that your inspiration will be protected’ writes Rainer Maria Rilke to Elisabeth Ephrussi in The Hare with the Amber Eyes. I think about this as I return from…
Read moreThe colour red, in stark contrast with last week’s grey-and-whites, has unexpectedly led me this week to an inspiring series of lectures by scientist Richard Feynman. It began with pictures of what looked like a flow of lava but appears to be a rare natural spring phenomenon…
Read moreWhat is the difference between a line – and certainly characters – drawn by hand and in print? How come that in the first case there is an unmistakable warmth which is hard to fake in print even if a collection of typeface imitates classical handwriting to perfection, specially adapted…
Read moreThe theme of imagination and play has not left me in the past weeks, as illustrated by hospital drawings, among others, which seem to have worried some of my friends recently. Sitting with the family around a Christmas fireplace, we discuss once…
Read moreAn entry in the ‘books’ supplement of our daily newspaper shows an amazing sketch of a person drawing in bed in what must be a most uncomfortable position. The lines are simple, the scene is gripping, it could be a child or an adult, but there is also a quality which…
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