April 22, 2020

Artist paints on toilet paper, strings it up in Utrecht

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:58 pm

Currently stranded in The Netherlands due to the Coronavirus crisis, American artist Daniel Miller, 33, has recently been painting tulips on toilet paper and hanging it around Utrecht. He needed to get something artistic out of his system, something ‘positive and absurd’, he said, and tulips on loo roll definitely qualifies.

On his art you can read the text “If you see me, you can take me”, in Dutch. Free art – we love free stuff in this country! He’s a quick study.

Daniel came to The Netherlands to get inspired and visit friends, but one hour after he landed, the Corona measures kicked in and he was destined to hang out with us a while longer.

Every day Daniel goes around town and hangs up his painted toilet paper tulips, hoping to bring some hope and happiness to people. “The Coronavirus is unavoidable. What surprises me is our reaction to it. How we blame each other, how we panic and come up with conspiracy theories.”

Be sure to check him out on instagram.

(Link: rtvutrecht.nl)

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January 9, 2019

Dutch ‘Rambo’ tulips at the Golden Globe Awards

Filed under: Film,Nature by Orangemaster @ 2:59 pm

The Dutch flower bulb company Borst from the wee town of Obdam, North Holland are now world famous for having provided the bouquets of tulips for the Golden Globe Awards, with a whopping 10,000 individual tulips having been ordered.

When the company received the order for the tulips from the United States, which doesn’t happen very often, they were kept in the dark about what they were for. Soon after the event aired, they got a message about what they were for and saw their product all over the news.

The fun part is, the Golden Globe opted for a type of tulip called ‘Rambo’, like the movie. “It’s a tulip that is heavy and gives big flowers,” explains Menno Boots from Borst.

(Link and photo: nhnieuws.nl)

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March 21, 2017

Spring is here, tulips from Amsterdam

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 11:49 am

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It’s spring in the polder and sometimes it’s good to stop and admire the tulips. Well, mostly daffodils at the moment on the side of the road, but you get the idea.

You may know the song ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’ made popular by Max Bygraves in the UK in 1958, but maybe you didn’t know it was a translation of a German song. According to Wikipedia, the song was first written in 1953 as ‘Tulpen aus Amsterdam’ by German singer, songwriter and entertainer Klaus-Günter Neumann, after he had performed at the Tuschinski theatre in Amsterdam and visited the tulip fields at Keukenhof.

Here’s Max’s version and of course a Dutch version by Herman Emmink.

And here’s a classic performance in the 1928 Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam not far from 24oranges HQ by Dutch pop singer Wilma Landkroon when she was a little girl.

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January 5, 2014

Colourized X-ray still lifes by Arie van ‘t Riet

Filed under: Art,Photography,Technology by Branko Collin @ 9:38 am

tulips-arie-van-t-rietArie van ‘t Riet is a medical physicist who became an artist by accident.

My Modern Met writes:

One day, his colleague asked him to take an X-ray of one of his art paintings. It was a thin object and van’t Riet had never done something like this before, but as he said, “it worked.” This got him thinking about what other kinds of thin objects he could X-ray and flowers came to mind. He started with a bouquet of tulips. The analog image, or the silver bromide X-ray film, resembled a black and white negative. It was digitized, inverted, and then selectively colorized in Photoshop. “And then some people told me that’s art,” he humorously states, “and I became an artist.”

Many more amazing colourized X-rays can be found at the My Modern Met article linked above and at Van ‘t Riet’s own website.

(Link: Boing Boing)

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February 2, 2013

Aerial photos of tulip fields by Normann Szkop

Filed under: Nature,Photography by Branko Collin @ 6:52 pm

Normann Szkop is a French photographer living in Brussels. Two years ago he convinced an Irish pilot living in the Netherlands, Claython Pender, to fly him over the tulip fields of Anna Paulowna (a place, not a person) near the tip of North Holland.

The colourful results can be admired at Szkop’s Flickr page. Szkop took almost 100 photos from the air and several from the ground.

Although Anna Paulowna is a town, it is named after a person, namely the wife of king Willem II and daughter of tsar Paul I of Russia, Анна Павловна.

(Link: The Verge. Photo: Normann Szkop)

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March 22, 2011

New tulip named after Vincent van Gogh

Filed under: Art,History,Nature by Orangemaster @ 11:33 am

Spring and the Keukenhof, the world’s largest flower garden that attracts visitors from around the world has a new red-brown tulip named after Vincent van Gogh.

Omroep Brabant got an explanation from Amsterdam’ Van Gogh Museum that there is no relation whatsoever between the flower and Van Gogh. He’s never even painted tulips, but he did like flowers.

(Link: vangoghmuseum, omroepbrabant.nl, Photo of Van Gogh tulip by vangoghmuseum)

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April 16, 2009

Yellow tulip named after Spongebob Squarepants

Filed under: Nature by Branko Collin @ 9:13 am

Last Wednesday famous cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants got a tulip named after him in the Keukenhof flower garden. Under the watchful of eye of many a young fan and the great big yellow sponge himself, the flower got baptized with perfectly good champagne by Nickelodeon presenter Patrick Martens.

It took grower Jan Ligthart from Breezand 18 years to develop the tulip, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). Presumably that time was not spent exclusively on this new tulip, as many companies have already paid the man to do the same. Ligthart told the paper it would take four years for the bulbs to arrive in Dutch stores: “The first bulbs are for the US, because they pay better abroad. It’s as simple as that.”

(Photo of a totally unrelated yellow tulip by Hisa Fujimoto, some rights reserved.)

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March 19, 2009

Keukenhof flower exhibition turns 60

Filed under: Art,Nature,Shows by Branko Collin @ 11:07 am

The Keukenhof flower exhibition, what Wikipedia calls “the world’s largest flower garden,” turns 60 this year. Last Wednesday Queen Beatrix opened this sixtieth edition, according to Blik op Nieuws (Dutch), which is themed ‘USA, New Amsterdam – New York, 400’ in honour of the claiming of the region by Henry Hudson in 1609, followed 15 years later by the foundation of New Amsterdam, which is now called New York.

Part of the exhibition is a giant flowerbed depicting the Statue of Liberty, which is not in bloom yet.

Photo by Nguyen Dai, some rights reserved.

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March 6, 2009

Keukenhof flower garden to buy poo artwork

Filed under: Art,Nature by Orangemaster @ 10:14 am

De Keukenhof in Lisse, the world’s largest flower garden which fills up with tourists in spring, is considering buying a lovely bit of artwork to spruce up the place: a big statue of poo made by famous multidisciplinary artist Wim T. Schippers. The director of the Keukenhof wants to place the 4,5 metre high artwork in the children’s play area, after having seen a picture of children climbing on it. And he wants to try and score the poo before Queen Beatrix opens the Keukenhof on 18 March.

(Link: telegraaf.nl)

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May 28, 2007

Tulipmania myth debunked

Filed under: General,History by Branko Collin @ 8:01 pm
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For the casual observer looking at the Netherlands, the Tulipmania story has it all: tulips, the Golden Age, the start of modern capitalism, windmills, clogs… OK, so everything but the last two. For the puritans among you, this tale has even got a moral. Here’s a quick recap of how the story goes:

In the 17th century, the Dutch were at the top of their wealth, both financially and culturally. The Dutch trading ships controlled the seas, and brought the treasures of foreign countries to these shores. This wealth ignited the local Renaissance, giving artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, and scientists like Van Leeuwenhoek and Grotius a chance to plie their trade. A story from that time goes that the first economic bubble was also created by the Dutch. Among the many things they imported were tulip bulbs, which started to fetch higher and higher prices. At one point, a box of bulbs would cost as much as a house. But in the spring of 1637 the bubble was burst; Dutch pride was punished, and thousands of traders went bankrupt.

At least, that’s the popular version of the story. According to a recent book written by Anne Goldgar, most of what we know about the bubble stems from propaganda from the period. An interesting review from the Financial Times tells more:

Some contemporary pamphleteers attacked the trade, baffled by what one Englishman called the ”incredible prices for tulip rootes”, and disquieted by the godless materialism of it all. […] Most tulip tales we know, scolds Goldgar, ”are based on one or two contemporary pieces of propaganda and a prodigious amount of plagiarism”.

In fact, during her research Goldgar could not find the name of a single person who had been bankrupted by the burst of the bulb bubble.

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