Social distancing, Week 2

Cherry trees in the gardens of Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne / March 2020

This week we went on a little expedition to the park behind Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, to see the cherry blossoms before they wither. There were very few people and we were extremely careful, but we still went home feeling guilty and slightly anxious. We probably won’t be doing that again soon. Funny, how something so simple such as leaving your home radius suddenly became a high risk activity.

Some other things from this past week:

• Started a Coursera course on autism. This was recommended by my boss, and it’s a very well built course on the essentials of autism, which are very helpful for me to review. I hope I can get into a nice rhythm with these courses: first with the ones that are imposed, and later on with other subjects
• Read few pages of Book 2 of a Portuguese translation of War and Peace that Jo recommended a few months ago
• Watched This is Us at the end of the day, a nice and sweet series about two parents and their three children, in different time frames
• My Pilates teacher has been giving our classes via Skype, but I’ve also been trying to squeeze in some Yoga with Adriene, which made me reeeelaaaaaaaxx my childbearing-childcarrying-weak-and-tight back
• My brother is a personal trainer and yesterday he gave me a training session via Houseparty. He designed it just for me and today I am sore enough that I have the feeling of having worked out, but not enough to not make me want to again. It was very cool to be bossed around by him (not something my teenage self would have imagined me saying)
• Got my very talented sister to teach me a little about photo editing and I’ve been trying my hand at that.
• Starting to think about childproofing our apartment, because baby has definitely learned to move around!

Looking forward to this next week!

Hodler et le Léman

Last week, we went to Pully, one of Lausanne’s neighbour villages, to see Swiss painter Hodler‘s work on the margins of Lac Léman.

What struck me the most about this exhibit was how the paintings of the lémanique landscape evolved over time and over the seasons. Earlier works were so much more realist: the landscape was painted with accuracy and detail. In some paintings there were people strolling along the margins and you got a realistic feeling of a Sunday afternoon on the margins on the lake.

Later on, he started to paint the landscape from several spots on the margins of the Lake. In this series, the lake is always the same (Lac Léman), but the paintings are so distinct according to their viewpoint, to the season and to the time of day. The light and shadow game in the paintings is special.

Towards the later years, Hodler was turned to symbolism and he used elements in nature to depict aspects of life. For example, the trees used to represent the human form, early on in bloom, and nude in his last years.

In the end of his life, Hodler was very sick and confined to his house in Geneva. From his balcony, he painted the views over the lake. In these last paintings, I feel like he extracted from the landscape everything that was light, emotion and movement. There are no buildings, no people, no details, just games of light and shade and layers of nature.

The exhibition was in a museum with windows looking over the Lac Léman. Because of this, you carry the feeling from the paintings with you between rooms and when you peek out the windows, it’s like you’re in a dialogue between art and reality.

It’s all very poetic.