I'm so thrilled to announce that I tokenized this image as my first artwork on NFR Showroom!
The image is from the art book I wrote in 2019. The dutch title is: "Leidsche Ommelanden", which means "Surroundings of Leiden" in a kind of archaic dutch. Leiden is the city I live in, and it happens to be the origin of "Holland".
In this book I show and tell the history of this town and surrounding lands. Lot's of windmill too, as you'd probably expected!
The picture on top of this post shows the Rhine-Schie canal (Rijn-Schiekanaal) near the city of Leiden, which has a history dating back to the roman canal of Corbulo. The predecessor of this canal has actually been dug by Romans, some 2000 years ago (give or take a hundred...).
Inspiration
Inspiration for this series are the books about The Netherlands, issued first half of the 20th century by the dutch biscuit manufacturer Verkade. The books were illustrated with collectable watercolor art pictures, which were reproduced with chromolithography. The art pictures were collected by children and later also by adults and had a very recognizable style.
We had a dozen of them or so in our bookcase at home. I still remember flipping through the albums as a little boy who couldn't read that yet. But I still remember the images.
Digital chromolithography
In my works I have been inspired by the typical colors of chromolithography and classical composition of the images in those books. Chromolithography was invented around 1900 and made it possible for the first time to make large-scale color prints.
I didn't use this very chemical and complicated process, of course. I've created the works as fully digital scalable vector images. They're based on photographs a took myself, when I was riding on my bicycle. How dutch can you go? I have rearranged the colors to give them the atmosphere of the images from the Verkade albums.
Oh, did I already mention that the artwork is for sale on NFR Showroom? There's only five of them available, so hurry hurry!!
