This illustration is inspired by the forest of Grand Belmont, one of my favorite forests in the canton of Fribourg. I saw a deer in one of my evening walks in this forest and felt like I needed to paint it. The whole scenery seemed surreal and magical, the deer popping out of nowhere, watching us for a while before taking of in the bushes.
This year Friboy and I exhibited at Comptoir des Créateurs, an event organised by l’Eventail at Blue Factory in Fribourg. It was our third gig of the year and I think he is getting the hang of it. He was very proud to show his art.
Illustration, gouache and watercolor on paper
Today Christianity celebrates Epiphany, or the revelation of Jesus Christ to humanity. Since living in Switzerland I tough that the catholic feast of the Three Kings was something else entirely than the orthodox one I was used to, Boboteaza = Baptism. It took me a while to understand that western and eastern Christians actually celebrate the same idea, the revelation of God incarnated as Jesus Christ and his manifestation to the world.
When I moved to Fribourg from the overcrowded and suffocating place where I lived before, shared with almost 4 other million souls, I had the impression nothing much was happening…no Christmas rush, no over the top Christmas lights or a huge Christmas market.
I still have one of the toys that Saint Nicholas left in my boots when I was a child, it’s a mother gorilla stuffed toy holding a baby gorilla in her arms. I had named her Uga because at that time I thought she looked like the daughter of Ugo Fantozzi, an Italian series my mother was watching on TV. I gave it to Friboy a while ago and told him that it was from Saint Nicholas, he was shocked because he doesn’t picture me as a child. I am his mom, I couldn’t have been a smaller person that believed in magic and waited impatiently for Saint Nicholas just like him. He never reacted like this when I showed him photos of me as a child, this gorilla made me that little girl in his eyes.
Autumn school break is over which means that for the past two days I have been binging on Harry Potter and Kambly biberli and taking long baths…in the bathtub. While our vacations have been getting easier because FriBoy has grown into a collaborative, easygoing and fun kid to be around, I still find it hard to manage his activities all by myself. We haven’t had grandparents here to help out in a long while, and those couple of hours a day, while they were in charge and I got to sit and do nothing, really mattered.
Half way through summer vacation and I feel like it has been another school year where I am the teacher. I had stopped drinking coffee a while ago, but vacation is not helping out with my resolution. Creativity is also fatigue, unless you take a break from it. And this has been our most intensely creative vacation, Friboy wants to create and build stuff every day, we even did it while vacationing in Latvia.
I wrote about the Old Highland Museum in a previous blog post in the context of their temporary exhibition of Swiss paper-cut art. However, this museum is well worth a visit for their permanent exhibition of traditional art and lifestyle of the Fribourg highlands.
We discovered this amazing nature trail a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for a short hike close to home that could entice FriBoy. He thinks humans don’t need to walk because they have cars, bikes and other vehicles for this purpose, courtesy of evolution.