The World of Joyce Kamikura: 2012 July The Baltics

Artist's Statement

My Paintings represent my personal response to my environment. My ideas are not whole but fragments of what fascinate me and are seeds from which my works begin to develop. As a result, although my works undoubtedly have roots in my daily living, they may be a good deal removed from reality; some of them may be quite representational while others become abstracts.

By exaggerating vibrant colours, entertaining visual textures and other elements of design I take my painting mediums beyond their traditional execution; into mixed water media, acrylic, collage and oil. A subject leads to an idea. Then it becomes an immediate cause for me to paint, ultimately experiencing fun and struggle of permutations and possibilities deriving from that idea. It is not so much in the final product, but in the process and struggle to bring all elements together to function in harmonious presentation in a painting, that I derive so much satisfaction and pleasure as an artist. Visit my other site: http://joycekamikura.wordpress.com/

Saturday, July 28, 2012

2012 July The Baltics

For the second year in a row, we visited Europe.

This year, we saw the Baltic region of northern Europe, covering all of the Viking countries, and more. We started in Copenhagen, staying in central town close to the Central Station across from Tivoli Gardens. It is a very friendly city offering many museums to see. Oslo’s Museum for Peace Nobel, Denmark’s Aarhus Museum, Copenhagen’s National Museum and Stockholm’s Vasa Museum, all offered distinctly different flavours of their history and culture. We also visited an interesting and quaint medieval town of Tallinn, Estonia.

But the highlight of the trip was St. Petersburg seeing its 300ft deep subway system; viewing beautiful buildings from the city’s many river arms; and many historical buildings relating to various tzars of the past. And then.....there is The Hermitage, the Winter Palace. The inside is anything but hermitage. The opulence, the wealth, and the greed of the tzars are intoxicating; all this while their people were starving. Immediately, the Palace of Versailles came to mind and thought no wonder both countries had famous Revolutions.

Helsinki was beautiful but uninteresting. Unlike St. Petersburg and other cities built on the delta of major waterways, Stockholm built on rocks of its archipelago gave the city contours attractiveness and interesting.

After returning to Copenhagen, we took a train to Gothenburg, Sweden where we were picked up by out daughter and her fiancee. Although they live in Geneva, Switzerland, they decided to have their wedding in a beautiful remote resort town called Lyskil which is about 3 hours drive from Gothenburg.

The wedding was a perfection itself. In spite of rain, cloud and incumbent weather during our trip, the wedding day gave us a clear blue sky all day. About 60 people from all over the world celebrated a real fun party where everyone became friends with each other and made merry until wee hours of the morning.