Living the Guggenheim

(I've just been told this is upside down, so try and imagine it the other way up)

(Fields of canola. I thought this was from our train trip to visit friends near Roskilde on Thursday but apparently it's the Olympic Highway in southern New South Wales - which I've never seen)

(As yet untitled and causing the most grief for the artist)

There has been an absolute frenzy of artistic expression here in Frederiksberg for the last few days.

I shall preface this by saying our flat here is not exactly the most hygge residence in dejlig Danmark. While the Jysk furniture is adequate and not completely awful, apart from family photographs we don’t have much in the way of artworks or nice pieces of furniture; we left all that in Melbourne. You tend to miss those things that were special about where you lived and we have moaned about our bare walls since we moved in here.

But not any more. Well, almost.

Unlike what I imagine of most scientists, NQDII has a self-professed artistic streak and, as I’ve pointed out in an old post, I don’t.

On Friday, he had a brilliant idea. He’d buy some canvases and paints and de-bare our walls.

Back in Melbourne, he’d once before gone to work in a flurry of brushstrokes, madly slapping paint around and created two rather colourful, if abstract, masterpieces. We also used to have ‘painting days’, complete with instruction from the maestro for our niece and nephews, at the time 7, 4 and 1ish. Those days saw most of the house literally covered in what transpired to be a palette of near permanent paint. Those days were marvellously memorable and fun for the kids but also meant we pretty much had to renovate the whole house. I learnt you can lay most of the year’s old newspapers on everything but you can't stop kids from walking through the paint anyway.

On Friday NQDII bought not one, but three large canvases, paints and set about madly scribbling some roughs outlines on paper and set to work for the whole day. Now, I don’t know whether you have much experience with scientists but they tend to get a tad obsessive over everything they do and nothing must get in the way of the task at hand. Consequently, my walking up and down the hallway caused yells of, ‘Do you have to stomp so heavily? I can’t think! I must be able to think!”

So I was very quiet.

The rest of the day was filled with sounds of brushing and brushing, slopping and slopping, grunts and groan and lots of talking – to himself.

Unfortunately, anyone who does know what scientists are like will also attest that the obsessive bubble can burst and any manic episode of high concentration and intense effort can be quickly followed by collapse.

That was Saturday.

There was still activity but somewhat subdued and, with that, much hand-to-mouth action and despairing shakes of the head - and no small amounts of reassurance from me. Work carried on, if in a more sombre mood.

By the end of the day, the mood had improved and, while the works are not finished, we shall soon, I hope, have some pieces for the walls.