Who's your Daddy!

But first a day at the Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art

 

Well rather than travel back to Nairobi after a full week working in Brussels, why not, on a perfectly beautiful European summer day,  go and see a friend in Amsterdam. It's more crowed than the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage in India but exciting all the same. From Central Station through to the edges of the beautiful canals that criss-cross the city.... people, people and even more people.


It was an ideal time to enjoy this special city and sit and have lunch and chat about this and that. Sunny and warm though not really hot, flowers blooming and almost everywhere the smell of Marijuana wafting from the bars and alleyways. Smells like freedom to me...

I'm not a huge fan of Modern Art feeling like there should be subtitles on each piece to just give me a hint of what I'm looking at and why. That said, the Stedglijk Museum is time well spent as it teases and provokes you, accessing recesses of your brain left dusty and forgotten.








 

Above was my second favorite piece though the description was well beyond me. Something about two minds wistfully contemplating an inaccessible future while reconciling the strict tensions that exists between man and nature as the existential chains of slavery fetter our very souls and all the while we struggle in vain to unlock secrets of the universe.. Huh???? WTF!!! I just think it looks nice ..... 😉 Pretty ...

A couple of my other favorites below;

Love it!!!

This is me trying to get it ... huh?

The vertical colored lines were another that really threw me off. The explanation was as long and as it was convoluted and completely incomprehensible though I'm pretty sure my daughter Stevie did that same work when she was 3..... only she stayed inside the lines better.

Modern Art explores relationships with geometric shape and proportion... I liked this... perfect for a 50 inch flat screen...

   

In this, I liked the stillness and quiet, you can just imagine the footsteps echoing as the early light baths the small town.

This was my favorite piece and with it being Father's Day today, gave me pause for thought. The painting -- to me -- is a father with wife and daughter. Europe in the background is dark, unforgiving and foreboding. The wife is aware of whatever it is but moves ahead with steely determination regardless.The daughter is happy, carefree and unaware.


Now the father, well he looks at us directly sharing his fear while hiding it from the family. His look is reserved for just us and we know in that instant that he is a father protecting his family from the truth, shouldering heavy burdens and protecting the innocence of his child's youth.


My father did the same for me. How many inconvenient truths did he shield me from when I was a boy. To what lengths did he go to preserve the innocence of my own childhood?


 My father is a good man - a brave man - and a caring man. I am grateful for the protection he offered, the love he shared and the values he passed to me so that my own journey through life would be as rich as possible. He's Nicolson in a few good men.... one of his favorite bits.... I'm glad he was on the walls that surrounded my youth.

Happy father's Day Pops!!!!



 




 Thanks for reading...Layno !!!