*inspired by Ingrid Jonker: “moenie slaap nie”
Photo: @LenaSchreijenberg

I had a busy month but I managed to keep up with my Chronicles art journal. Here are the past weeks

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

I wish you all a happy Easter.
Paint an egg or two, eat an egg or two and
keep on rockin’ in the free world!

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”

~ Timothy Leary ~

I’m pretty up-to-date with the week spreads in my Chronicles art journal.
Here’s the latest weeks

Chronicles 2026 – Week 4

Chronicles 2026 – Week 5

Chronicles 2026 – Week 6

Chronicles 2026 – Week 7

Chronicles 2026 – Week 8

Thanks for stopping by to look at my art journal pages.
Je t’embrasse

When I finished, I send Pamela the photos with a guiding letter in which I explained my work and methods. To show you the process and results I guess I best translate that letter for you:

“

Hi Pamela,
After we met and agreed to do “something” creative together, you came up with the first prompt: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. It didn’t take me long to agree on this theme for our first project because I immediately saw the potential of ‘old’. In my atelier, I keep a small box containing tiny scraps of old archive documents. At work, during restoration, I sometimes come across tiny pieces of paper whose origins are no longer clear. I do re-attach larger, torn pieces to the original in the right place, but these small pieces, sometimes with just a single letter visible, are untraceable and end up in the trash. Except when I find them, ’cause I take these orphaned pieces home with me and put them in a box.

Because the scraps are so small, I immediately thought about working on very small collages, and I had to make four of them. A ‘quadritch’. A few years ago, I made a few of those small collages and I always found it enjoyable and satisfying to create on such a small surface. Those collages often ended up in series of three and I felt like doing something similar for our first project. I had a nice, thick piece of watercolor paper lying around. I tore a strip from it, which I then divided into four pieces. Each piece is approximately 7,5 x 12 cm and these pieces served as the basic background. You can clearly see the torn edges…

I focused on “old, new, borrowed, and blue” in each collage. While working on each collage I deliberately didn’t think about the next one or the fact that I wanted them to be a series, because if I did, I might start thinking about a “procession” and immediately limit myself in material or color choices. I numbered the pieces of watercolor paper on the back so I would work in the correct order (that is: “correct tear edges in order”) and created them one by one. I thought that afterwards, when I’d finished them all, I would automatically find the coherence in the series.

Something OLD

I choose two tiny pieces of old archival material to start with (I’d guess the paper/parchment is from the 17th or 18th century) and then I delved into my boxes of scraps of paper; they had to be OLD scraps of paper. I found a lot of them. I finally created a composition with the following:

• A piece of parchment with some faint, old Dutch text still visible.
• A scrap of paper with some ink/parts of letters still visible.
• A larger piece of yellowish paper that is almost falling apart from its age and softness.
• A tiny piece of blue wallpaper from the hallway of my childhood home.
• A piece of torn cheesecloth, given to me by an artist friend I met when I had just moved back to Middelburg (2014).
• A red strip of paper cut from an old cigarette pack, from a box of empty cigarette packs my father collected as a teenager in the 1950s and which he gave me to use.

Something NEW

In December, I ordered a few square punches and two stamp punches. I used these for the first time to punch out the pieces of paper for this collage so it couldn’t be “newer”…

The clean squares have an architecturally “modern” feel, so I chose to punch plain coloured pieces of paper. I punched the pieces from a page of a Snoecks book/magazine. I have volumes of Snoecks issues and I chose to flip through the one from 2001 because that was the year that my beloved and I bought a house and moved in together.

A white line ran across a mainly black colored page and I punched out sections where the black area would move slightly while the white line continued.

Something BORROWED

I had to puzzle over the “borrowed” thing for a bit… who could I borrow something from, and what? I quickly came up with “tools,” which I could then also give back… but my beloved and I are two in our household, and everything is shared, so “borrowing” within the walls of our house doesn’t seem like “borrowing”… until I dove into his desk drawers! Look… I found an old toy car!

“Honey, can I borrow that?”

“Um, for what? OK, yes, but I do want it back.”

Exactly, that was the point!

I smeared some brown paint on my palette, drove the car through it, and then across my paper. Look… tire tracks!

Something BLUE

The ‘blue’ was quickly found. I love drawing ‘stones’ on that thick watercolor paper, I even have a special journal bound with thick watercolor paper to fill with paintings of ‘cairns’ (There is a lot to find and read about ‘cairns’, structures of stacked stones, on the internet. In principle: Cairn is a modern Scottish term, a corruption of carne, which was already used in the sixteenth century to indicate a prehistoric construction. Carne itself comes from the Gaelic carn = “heap of stones”).

The pile of three blue stones (or, if you prefer, eggs – because that’s what it looks like too) turned out well and to my liking, but the painting was still missing something… so I splashed and splattered some more with the paint which caused that ‘streamer of splatters’… oops!

This is the series as it lay on my desk, and I knew it wasn’t finished yet… although you can see from the tear lines that the four pieces fit together, the whole thing feels disjointed.

I left it as it was and only revisit it with a fresh eye a week later. I’d already figured I’d have to tie it all together by using the same color and/or technique throughout the collages, but how? It couldn’t be anything with color (too flashy and distracting). So, black. Stamps? No. Thin lines with a pen? No. I grabbed my trusty old sewing machine: black stitching would add extra shape and texture. I set the stitch to zigzag and sewed a line here and there.

For each piece, I looked for the right spot in the composition to add stitching, and—hooray!—I was also able to conceal that “splattered” string by stitching over it. I used the same size zigzag stitch on each collage. My intention was to pull all the end threads through to the back and weave them in, but when I placed the four pieces side by side with the threads still hanging out, I thought it looked fantastic so that I decided to let them hang.

Here’s the finished series.

“

I know Pamela was pleased with the outcome, and I know she herself created something completely different (which wasn’t surprising ’cause when two people create with a same theme, the outcome usually is quite different.) but she has to show that for herself if she wants to. You can find Pamela’s art on instagram.

I always start the year, and my Chronicles art journal, with One Little Word. I usually choose a word at the end of a year, but at the beginning of 2026 I still had not choose a word. I hesitated for a long time about whether I should choose a word at all, until this one popped into my head and stuck with me: “Ruimte” (space/room.)

I hope this year will bring many nice days and happy events so that the spreads, I fill this journal with, will be colorful and beautiful. Here are the first week-spreads:

Chronicles 2026 – Week 1

Chronicles 2026 – Week 2

Chronicles 2026 – Week 3

There are not as many people visiting blogs anymore so thanks for being here reading my post, I really appriciate you came by! Enjoy your day!

Friday haiku

Chronicles 2025 – Week 51

In mid-December, a nasty cold struck me. I had to stay home from work and sit it out. Acrylic paint, paperscraps, stamps and cut out images.

Chronicles 2025 – Week 52

Background: gelliplate print. Inspired by various art journal spreads I saw on social media, I ordered some punches to cut squares of various sizes out of paper. I punched out a square from each Christmas card I received, so I have the memories in my Chronicles journal without having to keep all the cards.

Chronicles 2025 – Last page

I close my journal, as I do every year, with a recent photo of myself (and this year, also with a short “review” of the year). The text on the right says “keep on smiling”.

I’ve been a member of a creative Dutch Facebook group Jook’s kunstcafé  for years. The group’s administrator, Joke, is loved by all the members and in early January, Joke would turn 70. At the end of 2025 there was a secret call to make a card for Joke’s birthday. All the mail was sent to her daughter-in-law, and on her birthday, Joke received a large box full of happy mail. It was a huge surprise for her! I’d responded to the request and created this card for her birthday.

… and now I close the book (journal) on 2025 and hope this year will bring less health problems and more happiness. My your days be peaceful and bright too! Seeya!

… en omdat er voornamelijk Nederlanders meededen ook maar even in ‘je moers taal’: we zijn bij de laatste dag van het jaar aangeland en dat is tevens de laatste dag van dit jaarlijkse blog-feestje. EN EEN FEEST WAS HET! DANK JE WEL AAN IEDEREEN DIE IETS INSTUURDE; JULLIE MAAKTEN DEZE LAATSTE WEEK VAN HET JAAR WEER TOT DE MOOISTE EN DE CREATIEFSTE! Als ‘t even kan volgend jaar weer? Zelfde plaats, zelfde tijd!

Art pieces in this last Top 2000 post:

24

If you want to play along, read this post for info & details in English & Dutch
(This is the last day of the party so if you want to play along, you better hurry. Otherwise, you’re welcome to play along next year.)

Here are all the art pieces we received ordered by number (counting down.) If there is more coming in today – and there sure will be flying in more submissions as this is the last day of the party –  we will add the art to this post and change the big, red number at the top, so you only have to look at the number to see how many art pieces in total are shown in the blogpost. So be sure to check in in the evening or tomorrow morning to see ALL the art that came in on this last day.

#235 Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water (Albumversie)
Made by Yvonne van Hoof (The Netherlands)

#225 Radiohead – Street Spirit (Fade Out)
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#213 Bon Jovi – Bed Of Roses (Albumversie)
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#204 Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication
Made by Els Hoekman (The Netherlands)

#164 Rob de Nijs – Foto Van Vroeger
Made by Kitty Kerver (The Netherlands)

#157 Tracy Chapman – Fast Car
Made by Delia Roza (The Netherlands)

#146 The Rolling Stones – Sympathy For The Devil
Made by Marit Barentsen (The Netherlands)

#140 The Beatles – Here Comes The Sun
Made by Bianca Kalksma (The Netherlands)

#140 The Beatles – Here Comes The Sun
Made by Bouwina Aalten (France)

#133 Coldplay & Avicii – A Sky Full Of Stars
Made by Patricia Guzmán (Argentina)

#125 R.E.M. – Losing My Religion
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#120 Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#103 Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights
Made by Susanna Lemstra (The Netherlands)

#86 Robbie Williams – Angels
Made by Monique Pol (The Netherlands)

#72 Amy Winehouse – Back To Black
Made by Susanna lemstra (The Netherlands)

#57 Queen – Don’t Stop Me Now
Made by Bouwina Aalten (France)

#44 Coldplay – Yellow
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#21 The Cure – A Forest (Albumversie)
Made by Angelique Elzinga (The Netherlands)

#5 Danny Vera – Roller Coaster
Made by Ineke de Smidt (The Netherlands)

#2 Billy Joel – Piano Man
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#1 Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Made by Ineke de Smidt (The Netherlands)

#1 Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Made by Yvonne Swinkels (The Netherlands)

#1 Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Made by Erni Kroondijk van Atten (The Netherlands)

#1 Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Made by Patricia Guzmán (Argentina)

SEE YA IN 2026, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Number of pieces in this post:

22

If you want to play along, read this post for info & details in English & Dutch

Here are all the art pieces we received ordered by number (counting down.) If there is more coming in today, we will add the art to this post and change the big, red number at the top, so you only have to look at the number to see how many art pieces in total are shown in the blogpost (and a lot of extra art pieces are coming in during the day… so be sure to check in the evening to see all the new pieces.)

#521 Black Pumas – Colors
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#511 BLØF & Counting Crows – Holiday In Spain
Made by Patricia Guzmán (Argentina)

#497 Billie Eilish – Bad Guy
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#488 Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal
Made by Dieke Polstra (The Netherlands)

#474 Andrea Bocelli & Giorgia – Vivo Per Lei
Made by Angelique Elzinga (The Netherlands)

#464 Simple Minds – Alive And Kicking
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#447 The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever
Made by Yvonne Swinkels (The Netherlands)

#415 The Waterboys – The Whole Of The Moon (Albumversie)
Made by Ineke de Smidt (The Netherlands)

#407 Jimi Hendrix – All Along The Watchtower
Made by Marit Barentsen (The Netherlands)

#395 Radiohead – Paranoid Android
Made by Ineke Jansma (The Netherlands)

#391 Bente – Kan Je Me Zien
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#383 Charles Aznavour – She
Made by Monique Pol (The Netherlands)

#383 Charles Aznavour – She
Made by Yvonne van Hoof (The Netherlands)

#356 Nena – 99 Luftballons
Made by Susanna Lemstra (The Netherlands)

#309 Don McLean – Vincent
Made by Delia Roza (The Netherlands)

#285 The Weeknd – Blinding Lights
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#280 Bette Midler – The Rose
Made by Kitty Kerver (The Netherlands)

#275 Live – Lightning Crashes (Albumversie)
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#263 Racoon – Tijd Verliezen
Made by Yvonne van Kersen (The Netherlands)

#259 Frank Sinatra – My Way
Made by Bouwina Aalten (France)

#252 BLØF – Zo Stil
Made by Els Hoekman (The Netherlands)

#242 Elvis Presley – My Boy
Made by Erni Kroondijk van Atten (The Netherlands)

Number of pieces in this post:

20

If you want to play along, read this post for info & details in English & Dutch

Here are all the art pieces we received ordered by number (counting down.) If there is more coming in today, we will add the art to this post and change the big, red number at the top, so you only have to look at the number to see how many art pieces in total are shown in the blogpost (and a lot of extra art pieces are coming in during the day… so be sure to check in the evening to see all the new pieces.)

#799 Dolly Parton – 9 To 5
Made by Susanna Lemstra (The Netherlands)

#780 BLØF – Hou Vol Hou Vast
Made by Bouwina Aalten (France)

#768 Miley Cyrus – Flowers
Made by Monique Pol (The Netherlands)

#755 Donna Summer – State Of Independence
Made by Yvonne Swinkels (The Netherlands)

#716 Van Halen – Jump
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#701 Eva Cassidy – Fields Of Gold
Made by Susanna Lemstra (The Netherlands)

#697 Iron Maiden – Can I Play With Madness
Made by Marit Barentsen (The Netherlands)

#694 Taylor Swift – The Fate Of Ophelia
Made by Dieke Polstra (The Netherlands)

#680 Prince & The Revolution – When Doves Cry (Albumversie)
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#671 The Cure – Boys Don’t Cry
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#618 Bankzitters – Stapelgek
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#604 Elvis Costello – She
Made by Kitty Kerver (The Netherlands)

#596 Seal – Kiss From A Rose
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#595 Al Stewart – Year Of The Cat (Albumversie)
Made by Yvonne van Hoof (The Netherlands)

#595 Al Stewart – Year Of The Cat (Albumversie)
Made by Delia Roza (The Netherlands)

#591 Earth, Wind & Fire – Fantasy
Made by Angelique Elzinga (The Netherlands)

#567 Froukje – Ik Wil Dansen
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#552 U2 – I Will Follow (Live)
Made by Patricia Guzmán (Argentina)

#544 The Beatles – Penny Lane
Made by Monique Pol (The Netherlands)

#522 Meau – Dat Heb Jij Gedaan
Made by Erni Kroondijk van Atten (The Netherlands)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR, I LOVE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK 

(en nog bedankt voor het poetsen van de keukenkastjes!)

Art pieces in this post:

23

Welcome to day 4 of my Top 2000 Musical and Creative BLOGPARTY!

If you want to play along, read this post for info & details in English & Dutch

Here are all the art pieces we received ordered by number (counting down.) If there is more coming in today, we will add the art to this post and change the big, red number at the top, so you only have to look at the number to see how many art pieces in total are shown in the blogpost (and a lot of extra art pieces are coming in during the day… so be sure to check in the evening to see all the new pieces.)

#1090 S10 – De Diepte
Made by Susanna lemstra (The Netherlands)

#1085 Cyndi Lauper – True Colors
Made by Yvonne van Hoof (The Netherlands)

#1054 David Bowie – China Girl
Made by Monique Pol (The Netherlands)

#1053 Ed Sheeran – Castle On The Hill
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#1052 Queen – Breakthru
Made by Patricia Guzmán (Argentina)

#1024 The Beatles – The Long And Winding Road
Made by Joke Overvliet (The Netherlands)

#1019 Pink Floyd – Breathe (In The Air)
Made by Ineke Jansma (The Netherlands)

#1013 Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
Made by Bouwina Aalten (France)

#1001 Iggy Pop – The Passenger
Made by Wiebine de Meer (The Netherlands)

#989 Red Hot Chili Peppers – Dark Necessities
Made by Marit Barentsen (The Netherlands)

#987 Tracy Chapman – Baby Can I Hold You
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#971 Stromae – Alors On Danse
Made by Bernadette van der Wielen (The Netherlands)

#968 Survivor – Eye Of The Tiger
Made by Charlotte Kums (Belgium)

#964 Bob Dylan – Blowin’ In The Wind
Made by Delia Roza (The Netherlands)

#961 Davina Michelle – Duurt Te Lang
Made by Susanna Lemstra (The Netherlands)

#952 Within Temptation – Faster
Made by Dieke Polstra (The Netherlands)

#936 Enya – Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)
Made by Yvonne Swinkels (The Netherlands)

#910 Suzan & Freek – Dromen In Kleur
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#910 Suzan & Freek – Dromen In Kleur
Made by Ineke de Smidt (The Netherlands)

#895 Frank Boeijen Groep – Zwart Wit
Made by Esther Klijn (The Netherlands)

#876 Tori Amos – Winter
Made by Angelique Elzinga (The Netherlands)

#852 Passenger – Let Her Go
Made by Kitty Kerver (The Netherlands)

#800 Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (Part 1 Albumversie)
Made by Erni Kroondijk van Atten (The Netherlands)