Fading Memories

That centralization is the way for the internet to go. Even though I work for Hyves, where we've got a silly number of messages, photos and chats stored on our servers, I still think the internet was intended to be distributed. Like email. Like the web. Like usenet.

But, well, I've got a hyves account now. I'm on linkedin. I'm on identi.ca (which forwards to twitter, which used to forward to Hyves, but I disabled that again). And now I'm on deviant art.

Our Krita Season of KDE student, Vera Lukman sort of prodded me -- we got talking about drawing and things. And I realized that I haven't touched my paints since we came to live in this house, in 2007. Probably more like not since 2006, even. I've done some sketching... Last year.

The question now is, of course, will this stimulate me to draw more? Will it finally make me use a computer for drawing? Will I get rich from selling prints?

What will happen to all my passwords if kwallet ever mangles my wallet? (Not that it has ever done so, touch would...)

Did I hack on Krita yesterday? Nope -- I did not, because Jeroen Sweers came to Deventer to play on the Grote Kerkhof.

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Yesterday afternoon I played hookey from hacking on Krita's brush engine and settings management code and grabbed pen, ink, pencil and paper and did some analog sketching. I feel I'm slowly getting back a little certainty of purpose in my lines; sketching really is something one should do every day, like coding. Behind the fold, also because there is some full dorsal nudity.

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One of the advantages of living in the old town centre of a provincial town like Deventer is the street organ -- and Deventer has a very good one. Radio en Televsie orgel de Turk has been carefully restored last winter and now sounds better than ever. This street organ is exactly one hundred years old this year -- it was built in France by the brothers Limonaire in 1908. From Paris to Amsterdam to Leyden to the Hague to Deventer -- where it's been doing its rounds since 1961.

Image cropped and scaled by Krita 2.0

The current owner has a really great choice in music: there's mostly something new every Saturday and there's a nice mix between jazz, old rock, classical stuff and folksy tunes. And it's great coding to all that up-beat music :-)

I still don't sketch enough, and even though I've got two weeks holiday I find it hard to grab paper and pencil and sit down to it. This is one I found when looking through my old sketchbooks, searching for inspiration.

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My eldest daughter Naomi started getting interested in drawing and sketching, nicking my paper, buying her own pencils, and becoming quite definitely, better than I have ever been, in about six months:

I'm pretty proud of her work!

It's weird, but even though I work together every day with people who live in Enschede, and though I've been told six or seven years ago that the Rijksmuseum Twente is well-worth a visit, I had never been to Enschede before. We had intended today to go to Rotterdam, to the Bojmans van Beuningen museum for the Dutch Primitives exhibition, but went the other way instead, to the Rijksmuseum Twente. At last.

It was well worth a visit: the neoclassicist exhibition with paintings from the Bruges school was rather nice and we bought the catalog. The collection of early Dutch painting is a bit uneven: it contains rather a lot of second or third rate work, but also a few absolute must-have-seen pieces. None of us has ever managed to get interested in modern, abstract art. Too often, a particular piece of modern art only looks good because all the other things surrounding it are even worse junk. The Pjotr Mueller statues were somewhat interesting, though.

The Rijks Twente is a nice place, rather quiet, too: we were three out of maybe ten visitors. Still I don't think museums should forbid visitors to photograph the pieces (if done without flash), that's a bit old-fashioned. And to share one pin card reader among the main desk, museum shop and restaurant is a bit quaint, to say the least. But well worth a repeat visit: they have a history of out-of-the-way exhibitions, especially about unpopular periods in the history of art. And that's something I'm very much interested in.

Made me query for Krita on Deviant Art. Of course, that doesn't only return images made with Krita, but also images depicting young ladies called Krita and even a fantasy image set in a city called Krita and a picture some Swedish artist made with physical pastell krita -- but there's a lot more art made with Krita than I thought, and a lot of it is pretty good.

I'm not sure what the rules on Deviant art are -- whether I can link to pages with image thumbnails or not, so until I'm clearer on that, you'll have to click on the search link and look for yourself.

First, the sketch I made for this year's seasonal greetings. It's actually our house and our church: the church is downstairs, we live upstairs. I tried to keep to the style of the Dutch painter Anton Pieck. Our part of town looks, especially if there is a little snow, just like his calendar illustrations anyway.

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For the past few years, since I started hacking on Krita in 2003, I have spent nearly all my spare time on Krita and KOffice. In the beginning, I did remember to spare a little time for actually drawing and painting, but quite soon I stopped doing event that. And whenever I picked up my pen, pencil or brush I noticed that what little skill I may have had had detoriated quite a lot.

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