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Spring is finally here in Sweden! It has been very cold here, too cold to paint outside much. As you may remember from my last email I came to Sweden to paint and to teach painting classes. The painting classes covered my airfare and some more but wouldn't cover all of my expenses.
My painting classes are on Wednesday nights in Torna Hallestad in Sweden. I have a place to stay with a friend there for that night. But for the rest of the week I go "Couch Surfing," usually three days at each house.
Couch Surfing is a way of making friends all over the world through the internet. You can find places to stay and new friends in other countries with the same interests as you. All of the members have one interest in common and that is meeting new people. Since I needed to find cheap or free housing in Sweden and Denmark, I joined Couch Surfing a few months ago and posted a profile. Then I joined some groups like the artist group. I looked at the couch surfing map and found artistic people in the areas that I wanted to go. Then I read each of the profiles to see if they looked like people I wanted to know . For safety's sake I checked the references that other people had posted about them. If I liked what I saw I sent them an email asking them if I could stay on their couch for a few days. Actually I am not so fond of couches so most of the places I am staying I could see in the profile that I would have a bed and sometimes even my own room. I then sent an email to see if they would let me stay with them for a few days.
My couch surfing experiences have been great fun.
My first experience was on the island of Mon in Denmark. There I stayed in a thatched house out in the country. Lambs were going to be born any day, and my hosts took me around to see the chalk cliffs next to the turquoise waters. One of their rams was not a very nice sheep and kept butting the owner so he was slated to become lamb steaks. His picture is on the top right. I exchanged a painting of Sweden for a beautiful white and gray lambskin (not the ram's).
Then I went to Roskilde where I had been invited by a couch surfer to be a concert artist. I got to hang my paintings on a wall and for two hours about 250 people listened to chamber music and looked at my paintings at the same time. The concert was followed by a delicious Danish meal with huge slabs of bread, heaps of shrimp, chicken, roast beef, and chocolate walnut pie.
Next on the agenda was Shimrashamn where it was beautiful but too cold to paint outside. Not that I didn't try. The weather would be sunny and beautiful in the morning and by the time I was out on a bike surveying the coastline for possible landscapes it had turned bitterly cold. I finished the painting, Reed Wave just as the hail started falling. So two afternoons I went to the public sauna and steam rooms and got toasty warm.
In Malmo I stayed with a famous Swedish journalist. It was still very cold so I went to the giant skateboard park and took pictures of the kids making leaps on their skateboards. I got some good photos and painted one of them. I will post it soon, but it isn't quite finished.
In Benstrup, Denmark my new couch surfing buddy, Aviaja, lives at an artist collective. Most of the artists re musicians. But the weather is finally turning warm enough and pleasant enough to paint outdoors. So the last two paintings on this page are from Benstrup. Aviaja has a masters degree in eskimology and is an eskimo herself from Greenland. One evening we went to an "opera." It was really funny as there were a number of improvisational skits with two people. One would be an opera singer and the other a dancer. They also had very silly costumes on. Two referees in orange and black striped shirts would give them silly stories and the opera singer would sing and the dancer would dance to the story. Bravo!! Afterwords there was rock music. I took some photos which I hope will turn into paintings. This was all put on by students doing collaborative work at various colleges.
Some of you may remember Yuki, a foreign exchange student from Tokyo. She is going to come visit me in Sweden for a week and we are going to go couch surfing together.
The big news is that my son, Steven is going to get married in a year to Jamie. It will be up in Fairbanks, Alaska where he is living.
Well, that is all of the news in Lake Woebegone where the men are good looking and the women above average. I hope you are all in good health and spirits. Write me and say, "hello."
