Dominique Goblet Drawings

Old (2002) and New (for those of us who are just discovering or re-discovering) these drawings of typical Belgian landscapes and architecture by Belgian (Graphic Novel) artist Dominique Goblet.

Souvenir d'une Journée Parfaite by Dominique Goblet
("Remembrance of a Perfect Day"), color. Belgium: Fréon, 2002.

The 'comics' work of Belgian artist Dominique Goblet is immediately striking in that it not only ignores, but in many ways seems utterly uninfluenced by the usual conventions of comics. Goblet is a multi-talented artist who works in comics, painting, and photography, as well as installation art that combines all of those forms. Her visual style, often mixed-media, can leap, page by page, from agitated and scratchy drawings that seem to mar the paper they were created on, to gentle and lyrical images with the placidity of watercolors. Like her graphic style, her comics themselves are multi-faceted and intensely personal. Souvenir is a complex story that combines both fiction and autobiography and, more urgently than telling a specific story, reveals to the reader an intimacy and personal voice rarely found in comics

This post via http://www.indyworld.com/

http://www.dominique-goblet.be/

Nano Art by Frederick de Wild

by Belgian artist Frederik de Wilde

This post via http://www.bamart.be/

REALPOLITIK by Valery Lippens

Powerful, horrifying, humorous, disrespectful, gutsy, visionary ... I love this series of cultural, historical and political icons reinvented for the visual/ocular fiend ... as seen by Belgian photographer Valery Lippens.

"This Work in Progress Serie… samples from a mélange of historical, pop culture, philosophical, comedic, and Internet image to create a montage in the vein of the the literary montage style invented by Walter Benjamin as part of his Arcades Project… The idea is to liberate the suppressed “true history”… a quest for traces of the untold, the ignored and the suppressed… producing some disturbing and provocative outcomes…"

This post via http://www.valerylippens.com/

Cuperdon

You can recognize a country by the food they serve. Everybody knows Belgian chocolate, but what about the cuberdon candy. For many Belgians a beloved childhood taste, but unknown outside our frontiers. The recipe, that dates back to the 19th century, is a well kept secret only known by a handful of confisiers (aka candy makers). You can recognize a classic cuberdon as a violet collared sugar cone containing a thick raspberry syrup. 

How does it get that way? Well we know that cuberdons are hand-made with carefully selected ingredients, among those are gum arabic and raspberry aroma. All of these go into a copper pot to cook, the obtained mixture is poured into conical forms to be dried in an oven during five to six days. This kicks in the crystallization process of the outer layer, while the core stays liquid. The restricted durability of fresh cuberdon (three weeks) is caused by the sugarization of the core. One of the main reasons that this sugar-rush-giving candy is not exported! 

Biting off the top and sucking out the syrup is the classic way to devour a cuberdon, resulting in a volcanic explosion of liquid raspberry-scented sugar. Today you can get more than 25 different perfumes, going from apple to liquorice. All this sweetness was almost lost in oblivion as the second world war knew a lack of gum arabic import. But some passionated confisiers, that remembered the unwritten recipe, restarted production in 1946. Today the cuberdon entered the culinary world of star restaurants. The cuberdon inspired desserts of Roger Van Damme are praised by foodie idols such as Ferran Adria of El Bulli. But cuberdons stay a people’s candy. You don’t have to visit a fancy restaurant to try them out, instead you can buy them at your local market our quality candy shop. So hop on a train, take that plane and enjoy your Belgian cuberdon!

This post via http://www.ilovebelgium.be/

Sandworm

Sandworm is an organic structure/space/creature realized on the dunes of the Wenduine coastline, Belgium. The 45 meters long and 10 m wide and high installation moves freely in-between architecture and environmental art and is constructed entirely out of willow following the local knowledge of a continuing interaction between work and environment. Marco Casagrande worked hard with his team of young architects and local experts for 4 weeks in order to create something that he describes as “weak architecture” – a human made structure that wishes to become part of nature through flexibility and organic presence. 

To read the rest of this article and see the drawings of this incredible project
click here http://sandwormcasagrande.blogspot.com/

 This post discovered/via http://inhabitat.com/

Brussels as seen by Jordan L. Rogers

 

Brussels, Belgium by Jordan L Rodgers 

This post via http://blogut.tumblr.com/