After two inspiring weeks with friends, beach dogs, and good food, I’m back at the studio.
On Monday I started right away with a printmaking session with Emma. Oh that felt good!

As much as I love living in Sweden, I need to get out and travel to keep feeling like myself.

I need:
– cool people and art friends
– socializing with random strangers on dog walks
– great food
– inspiration (museums, art friends, books, book shops, markets,…)
– a change of scenery once in a while
– to hear Flemish

I also wanted to get a break from the icy road situation here. To our surprise, we got snow in Belgium too, but it melts away so fast that you have to hurry to watch its beauty. I definitely had too many spring clothes with me haha.

I had 2 weeks left of my ‘museumpas‘, a Belgian museum subscription I joined last year. What I love the most about this is that you pay a fee once a year which gives you access to many Belgian museums without additional costs. This way it’s easy to visit a museum where I would otherwise hesitate to pay the full price– or in case I don’t like it, I would regret it or force myself to watch everything instead of walking out.

One of the museums I visited is the Toy Museum in Mechelen. I’ve been there with my dad decades ago, (and before the new location) so I was very curious.

+ cool new location, modern, lots of space
+ interactive for kids
+ both very old games and newer additions
+ a nice division of categories
+ screens with extra info about the displayed toys

– for the space they have, they could show off way more actual toys and games instead of focusing more on the interactive part. The cafeteria and extra playroom for kids were bigger than the exhibition space.
– there was a tour with kids which was extremely loud (and teachers trying to scream louder than the kids). Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t consider a museum a place for loud games and screaming (they were not playing the games that were on display). Even as a child, I appreciated the quiet exhibitions. In the Royal Museum of Art in Antwerp, there are, for example, special lamps that project texts on the flood, but you can only get it sharp when you hold something under the light. And they have relief stamps all over the museum. That’s interactive too, but in a way that’s not overstimulating.
– some parts were rather dark, especially compared to very bright screens.

–> obviously just my personal opinion and preferences.

It wasn’t planned, but a focus point for this travel emerged: comic books!

We got the whole series of TinTin, something we’ve been thinking about since visiting the Hergé Museum last year.

Picking up an order: Suske & Wiske, a few books by Franquin, and postcards by Andreas Vanpoucke.

In Antwerp, I came across these boxes of comic books for 1EUR each! Heaven!

I got the Suske & Wiske comic I have been looking for, for a long time. It’s “Op het eiland Amoras” but a two colour print with the old Flemish spelling.

The drawing style is less polished than in later albums, and the use of colour reminds me of risograph prints. It’s as if I finally found a treasure!

But I got a few more, mostly old ones as I’m particularly interested in the way they use text, onomatopoeia, and contrast.