Back home again....

We left the snow and the cold behind to make a visit to our home country in early spring. Well... it is not as springlike as we had hoped with a lot of stormy winds and heavy rains but it makes for some wonderful cloud formations, the ones you can find in so many paintings of the Dutch Old masters. This picture was taken on our trip to one of the best flower bulb shows (in Breezand) in the northern part of the country and it combines the old and the new in a wonderful way. On the left there is a taditional windmill, on the right a very modern architectural building that looked like someones home (from where we were we could not be sure) but it did look fascinating. This part of the country is still somewhat empty, meaning that you can see a horizon once in a while and some unobstructed meadows and dunes.
An important part of the flower bulb growers have moved up here from the area they used to be in, around Lisse and Hillegom, because the price of land is getting too high there. The first fields of daffodils were in bloom already as were the Crocus fields, providing strokes of intense purple, white and warm yellow to the surrounding straw covered fields. Big clumps of Snow drops grow in lawns around farms, under trees in wooded areas and next to the ditches and roadsides. What a difference with my snow covered Milwaukee yard where it has been too cold to even remove the Christmas tree from the back patio!
So far it has been a relaxed trip and although most of it is reserved for business visits for the flower bulb part of us, there is also time for art. later today we will attend an opening at gallery JaJa, a gallery I have been working with since the 90's. Later in the week I hope to have enough time to visit some more galleries in Amsterdam and get some updates on what is going on. For now I'm just very much enjoying myself, taking in the famous Dutch light (more silvery and veiled as the Midwestern) and compare the differences in landscape once again, I do not favor one above the other, it's just very nice to be able to compare.
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