Photo courtesy of Daniel Wanke on Pixabay.com
Somehow I became a fan and collector of Marjolein Bastin’s work without knowing it and without intention.
Marjolein is a 75-year-old Dutch artist. As a very young girl, she fell in love with nature. Every walk or venture outside found her collecting flower petals, pinecones, feathers, and seeds. To this day, she follows the same routine. Every afternoon she walks outside in nature to soak it all in. She has an uncanny knack for ferreting out the tiniest interesting detail of a scene. She collects items from nature on her walks and then arranges them into scrapbooks for future inspiration.
Rising at six and working on her art until evening is a clear indication that she loves what she does and doesn’t consider it labor at all.
Her work is found worldwide since she and Hallmark have a partnership. Actually, I think the first piece depicting her art I ever bought was at a Hallmark store. It’s a small, short table with metal legs and a garden scene on top. Then at a consignment store, I found a dozen salad plates, half of them with the same scene as on the table. Then I was given a candle with a winter scene etched on the glass and top; later I found a free-standing ornament that repeated the same scene. Through the years I’ve bought her planner calendars. There are another half-dozen items with the famous MB stamp on them around my home, many of them bought without my realizing it was her work.
The salad plates have the botanical names of the flowers written around the outside edge of the plates. One of the flowers pictured and named is ranunculus. When my children were teens, we thought that was a perfectly good word to use in place of ridiculous. “He said what? Oh, that is absolutely ranunculus!”
We still say it today.
And in fact, my daughter chose ranunculus as one of the flowers in her wedding bouquet.
That made me smile.
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