oneiriad

Spent a day in Varde. Well, part of the day - I thought I'd take advantage of being nearby while I still am, and go visit Varde Museum and its Otto Frello exhibit.

I think I've gushed about the painter Otto Frello before, but it's definitely something that bears repeating. Because his paintings are just - gorgeous. Seriously, gorgeous.

He's - well, not a surrealist, not really - a fantasy painter. He'll paint a city of porcelain houses in the background while the statues of Copenhagen have come alive and are having a bit of a party in the foreground. He'll paint a landscape with a lake, flocks of birds and pterodactyls whirling through the air, a family picnicing by the shore of the lake close to where tiny seamonsters are frolicking.

And they're happy pictures. The people in them are always smiling, genuinely smiling - not scary, not fake - smiling. The happy child smiles in his nice room, but so does the crowd of people sharing the dismal room next to his. Even the last human being is smiling, leaning on the frame of the picture and smiling out at you, a blasted landscape behind her? Some of them are downright dystopic and yet - beautiful and happy and just gorgeous.

And the detail - Frello used to illustrate books about clothes of the world, animals of the world - and it shows. The level of details in these paintings is huge. You can come back again and again and find more details you've missed before - and they're huge, some of them, and you really need to see them in RL to get the sheer level of detail, because the computer screen simply can't really show it - it's too small (the porcelain pigeon is just a white smudge on the screen :-( )

They're gorgeous paintings. It cheered me up, just looking at the ones exhibited. (and no, oneiriad, you're not going to add the Sofastykke poster to your wishlist, you've already got the Købermagergade poster, you should diversify, right?)