The Exhibition Opening

Its been a nice week, with all the family around bringing the house alive with laughter and preparations for the opening of the new exhibition.
The opening coincides with some kind of art festival here in Oostende, which sends people around all the local galleries. Entertainment is chosen by the organisers and we ended up with a poet, who apparently is quite well known, and a band. That was all we knew. Mie expected it to be a busy night.

So excitement was in the air as we deep cleaned and stretched the gallery into the living room and dinning room as more and more art arrived. We arranged shelves to avoid people wandering into the kitchen during the exhibition. David still found one though, a lady who asked him something in dutch and then said ‘Its a nice house’ and wandered off.

Christophe Deroo’s paintings slipping into the dining room

A variety of sculpture in the gallery

Mie Ghesquiere and Mieke Recour’s mobile which we helped put up by balancing on tables. I like this piece, its like the felt balls are breaking through the ceramics.

My favourite piece is this one by the street artist Sander Anseeuw. Its such a nice composition between the boards and the spray painting itself. I would love to have a go at spray painting, it must be so difficult to get this kind of detail though…

Here is another of Mie’s works. She is very influenced by the sea and creates all these beautiful delicate bowls and tea light holders but they are in another two exhibitions as well…

There really were plenty of people! We were in charge of drinks, red, white or sparkling wine, orange juice, still or sparkling water – much more than anything I’ve seen at any other opening, even Tate Modern weren’t so genrous!

A couple of days before, I made green tea eclairs, which were delicious but not as strong in flavour as I expected. I had leftover egg whites so wanting to experiment more with the flavour I made a huge batch of meringues. Chocolate, vanilla, coconut and of course green tea. Which were amazing! I’m not usually much of a fan of meringue as its just so sweet but the green tea compliments the sweetness perfectly!

What was left of them after we ‘tried’ them were scattered around in bowls alongside nuts and those funny brown, salty sticks.

It was a long night, but we had fun chatting, drinking wine and as people started to mingle away, we sat down to a HUGE Chinese takeaway.

As for the entertainment, I didn’t see the poetry, but judging from the amount of signed books afterwards, it must have been good. I found the band a little disappointing though, they looked so interesting. The four of them all with different sized saxophones ranging from a tiny weeny one to the really big one. I thought ‘my mum is much better’, even just by her self. But as they only played two songs before rushing to the next gallery there wasn’t much time to judge.