Thursday .... and no mouse!

Hi everybody, today I made it to the coffee maker without seeing any dead mice lurking under my kitchen table, no leaves, either! Got my first cup of coffee without problems, and sneaked back to bed with it for a quarter of an hour which somehow stretched into a good hour. That's one if the good things about being a pensioner!

Yesterday I spent the day with my friend Inge. I buy fresh rolls on the way to her place, she gets the coffee and eggs ready, and has the table nicely laid when I get there, and then we sit over breakfast for about 2 hours, solving the problems of the world - except our own! After that we play cards, then it's time for lunch, then coffee and all of a sudden it's time to go home again. Why does time go so quickly when you're having a good time?

After getting home, I had to make a decision. H******k or some creative time? If you know me a little bit, you will know that I went into my arty kitchen and started making a mess. Actually I wanted to paint, and did start, but ended up making a rather dismal collage instead. I used browns and greens and some gold for the background, and then collaged layers of torn maps and other pictures from a tourist prospect, before adding some sack linen, string, dyed flowers, lace etc. The picture in the middle is an old postcard of *L'inconnue de la Seine* - the unknown female from the Seine. In Wickipedia it tells us, *According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide was suspected.
A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a moulder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. According to other accounts, the mask was taken from the daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany. The identity of the girl was never discovered. The moulder who took the cast of the face was believed to be based at the Lorenzi family model-making firm. Claire Forestier, a member of the Lorenzi family, believes that the model was not dead when the cast was taken. She works in the family modelling workshop, and says that a dead body from a river would not have such clear features. She estimated the age of the model at no more than 16, given the firmness of the skin.
In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, inviting numerous speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
The popularity of the figure is also of interest to the history of artistic media, relating to its widespread reproduction. The original cast had been photographed, and new casts were created back from the film negatives. These new casts displayed details that are usually lost in bodies taken from the water, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity.*

There are a lot more stories about her in the internet if anyone is interested. I always found her face and the story so intriguing.
I know this collage is rather different to what I often make, but sometimes I seem to need to do such things! The first photo shows the painted background,

Hope you all have a good day, take care, and thanks for dropping in!