Marije in the Shop

On Thursday evening, October 24, we had a theme evening about "Artisans, Try to capture the posture."

I arrived late at the club evening because of the house. More about that later. At first, I had no affinity with this theme. Actually that can happen really often, and then I use to think that it is a question of making something my own. Is that not a common expression "that you have to own the situation"?

So, in this case, I searched for artisans in general. Somehow I thought about painting a farrier at first. That is actually a not so picturesque type of artisanry. People are standing bowed over the foot of a horse, and somehow there are thousands of pictures straight on the head of the farrier. You cannot see the person! Not to mention how difficult it is to paint a horse. That was not going to happen.

After several attempts at searching for a picturesque artisanry I figured that I made things to complex. Started over, searcht for artisanry in Dutch. Out came this photo of a woman working with something.

That was when I realized there was something here I liked much. The woman, or girl, was doing something. What was it? There was a little mystery in this motive. Not much, just in that she is doing something, and what can it be?

There is light shining on her. So much that her chest is lit up. She looks down and also her face is lit up. She is working with light. Already the challenge of capturing the work of someone working with light is a poetic aspect right there. She is a woman, and I am fond of women doing their thing, so I liked that aspect as well. Then when it comes to the actual work she is doing, I did not spend much time painting her hands. On the photo, her left hand was a bit blurry, so that did not help either. It is really difficult to paint hands. Since I was late I could not turn this into a hands analysis. The hands had to be sketchy. But that did not matter, she was doing something looking down on her work, and that was all I needed, and she was lit up by her workpiece.

Behind her I realized she had samples of work that she had done. That was really nice. Pieces of art.

With this I felt that I owned the subject and enjoyed painting her. I even signed her name on the painting "Marije" of Marije Wolfswinkel. I found out other artists were inspired by this photo, that there were drawings of Marije. Cool.

Another subject. What is the situation with the new house? After we got an offer for a mortgage of the house we could use that to get the Bibob test accepted. With that done, the day after on Friday 18 October, we received a letter from the municipality with a list of 17 additional things we had to add to our building permit application. We worked over the weekend having most of the things sorted. On Monday we had contact with the municipality and had one thing explained to us. When analyzing that further we came to a conclusion we had to have contact with the company building the house for us. They, actually a subcontractor to them, were very helpful and found out he missed a couple of things but he did not understand the requests from the municipality either. He called them, and it turned out they had simply missed some of his documents in the first round.

On Wednesday, we submitted 22 new documents to the municipality.

Lo and behold, on Friday morning, we received a letter stating that our application will be delayed until the end of January next year. That blows our schedules considerably. We tried to get hold of our contact person at the municipality to talk about this because from all earlier information we would get a six weeks extension from 18th of October and no 12 weeks extension.

That is where it stands today. Disgruntled and worried, they really mean it. We will call them next week.