Monday, March 25, 2013

UNO-family tree

Finally, the "family-tree" at the new Café UNO is ready.
I have been slowly working at it for the last half a year.
I took the photo just before I finished coloring the last bit to the right.
Now, all the youth that regularly visit the café can scribble their name on one of the leaves.

This is the concept-painting for the coffee-tree.
I made it the evening before I was going to paint it.
This version is not as swirly as the one in the café,
but it does have my signature leaves.

Nose on the wall

Because I only have worked with pictures the size of a book-page, I am used to be at physically close distance to the drawings I make. Most of the time I am leaning over the paper with my nose nearly touching the surface. You could say that the drawings are being made inside my personal space.
I needed to get used to the feeling of dozens of people looking on as I made this tree. I was out the safe feeling of my private space, and worked on on the painting with my pack turned to the whole rest of the café.


This is was the day I started to paint the tree.
You can see that I keep my body and my face close to the wall.
I think it makes me look a bit spiderish, with my long limbs.
foto: John Christian Fjellestad 


When I traced my own family-tree in the Netherlands,
I did not find it to come any further than a moped-ride away. 

Apropos family-tree

An eager "relative", digging for the origin of the Middag-family tree contacted me a few weeks ago. He was puzzled about how my line of Middag´s was connected to his line of Middag´s. He claimed that all the Middag´s came out of the Alblassewaard, and that we are very very far down descendants of Charlemagne. He knew for a fact that we don´t have rights to this castle.
When we compared geneologies, we couldn´t get them to connect.
As of today, the origins of my family are only a few-hour moped-ride away from where I grew up.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

wow, this was really cool! Maybe I should write my name there too.

If you want any comments, use rather e.g. http://disqus.com/ or the facebook comment plugin. Instead of blogger-comment feature with even robot unconfirmation. Much easier when you can comment with your facebook og twitter-profile.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment-tip, I´ll have a look at it.
I thought you could take some good photo´s of the tree, since you are one of the town-photographers.

Barbro said...

The tree looks really good!

Unknown said...

I´ll have to post an updated picture of the tree soon, most of the "leaves" have names on them, a few in arabic writing. And a bunch of "russekort" inbetween.