We’ve been taking the public ferry to and through the archipelago that surrounds Stockholm. Some of the boats are steamers, lovely old boats with thickly varnished wood and crimson velvet seating, chugging back and forth between the city and the far reaches of the outer islands. The round trip may take 3-4 hours. I wish you were here, you’d love it!
Here’s Buck, painted from one of his archive photos. Oh, how I miss him while we’er in stockholm. I’m emotionally dependent on his omnipresent indifference and I don’t even mind when, out of the blue, he’ll hiss and bite the hand that feeds him (that’s my hand.) He’s not the best cat but he’s my cat and I forgive his miscreant ways. Meow.
This painting shows landscape design in the city, the pollarding of a formal grove of trees. Pollarding involves the removal of tree branches to improve the fullness and shape of new growth that will follow. It’s a labor-intensive, tedious practice centuries old.
This is somewhere I’ve been before. Come with me.
The Black-headed Gull is a species of the northern Europe and Asia. Their plumage changes seasonally, the example shown here being that of the warmer, breeding months. They’re 11-14″ long and are primarily found close to land. They eat everything. The bird show here was encountered while we sat waiting for a train in Stockholm. Their scientific name roughly translates as ‘laughing gull’.
This is a long view of a Stockholm Avenue, bordered by buildings built in the mid to late 19th c. The city is planned to have wide transit corridors that direct train, car, bike, scooter and pedestrian traffic all along the same path, accommodating each mode safely in parallel. The result is lots of wide urban space without buildings encroaching on it and a sense of openness in what is, in fact, an overall densly built environment. There’s an abundance of trees and flowers in these spaces. Lovely.
https://www.dailypaintworks.com/fineart/jean-krueger/valhallawagen-se/1062388
Stockholm has beautiful street paving. Much of it is granite, a hard material that resists the freezing and thawing that destroys softer pavements. On hills, and there’s many of those, the arced and diagonal patterns prevent slips and sliding. Each stone is four to five inches, a tedious fan shaped mosaic. My shadow breaks the monotony.
We walk by this Church with some frequency. It’s named Adolf Fredriks kyrkogard, it’s a cruciform shape, that is, cross-shaped. I really can’t guess its age, maybe 150 years or much older. Anyway, it has a graveyard on one side and the ground is covered with drifts of early spring flowers. they’re call ‘Glory of the Snow’ here, Chionoxdoxa botanically.
Jean Krueger Fine Art 