Indice dei contenuti per December 2021 - February 2022 in Womankind

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

“The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we’re aware that we’re using it.” Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code You’re no doubt familiar with the ‘to do’ list - a tool to keep you on track and create some structure in an otherwise chaotic life - but you may not be as familiar with the ‘break list’, which lists the breaks you hope to take and what activities you intend to do. In his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel H. Pink recommends adding a ‘break list’ into your phone or computer calendar “so one of those annoying pings will remind you” to take a break from being ‘on task’. What do you on your ‘break’ is completely up to you, but these short scheduled breaks…

Why is it that the Dutch always tend to take one of the top spots in world happiness rankings? For the past 10 years, the United Nations General Assembly has organised a study of its member nations to identify factors that contribute toward or undermine happiness, based on six factors: real GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Each year, the results are published in The World Happiness Report, giving us a sense of the societal factors that are associated with the experience of what researchers call a sense of “subjective well-being”. Social psychologists, too, have been studying the topic of human happiness increasingly in recent years. In his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern…

I grew up in The Hague, a little town in the Netherlands next to the sea. My dad was a documentary maker and my mother was a fashion journalist, and then art historian. My father made documentaries about the magic of light in the Netherlands, about the reflections and what it did on the water. We have so much water in this country, the light has always been special. Even in the 17th century, painters from all over the world came to the Netherlands to capture the light. So I feel like my whole childhood was filled with, I don’t know, seeing beyond, like stories of textiles or stories of light. My father would always take me to the seaside to really see, “Hey, you cannot just watch it, you…

Where were you born and when did you move to the Netherlands? I was born in Denmark. My parents moved to Sweden, so I grew up in Sweden. Well, I lived there until I was eight years old, and then my mother took me to the Netherlands. I lived both in Sweden and half in the Netherlands. And then eventually when I went to high school, I stayed in the Netherlands. In Sweden, we lived in the middle of the forest. When I was in the Netherlands, I really missed nature. There’s not so much nature in the Netherlands. Also, I only lived with my mother - my brother stayed in Sweden. My mother was quite unhappy, so it wasn’t easy. Apart from those things, I really like the Netherlands,…

Tulips will bloom for just one to two weeks in spring - or, sometimes, just a few days. Yet in the Dutch Golden Age certain variants of these colourful flowers became so sought after that their bulbs went for the price of a bricks-and-mortar house. Tulip mania has, for centuries, captured the public imagination. The era has been used in countless economic classes as an example of one of the world’s first speculative bubbles. Depictions have included a bestselling novel, Tulip Fever, by Deborah Moggach, and a spin-off film of the same name, adapted by Tom Stoppard and starring Alicia Vikander, as well as countless paintings. In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay helped reignite popular interest in tulip mania by including it as a cautionary tale in his book Extraordinary…

In her 2015 memoir Hold Still, American photographer Sally Mann made a clear distinction between her life and work: “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made… It should make no difference in the way the work is viewed, tempting as it is to make that moral connection… If we only revere works made by those with whom we’d happily have our granny share a train compartment, we will have a paucity of art.” Mann’s opinion appears to be an increasingly unpopular one. While the question of whether an artist’s behaviour can or should be separated from their work is hardly new, it has assumed a renewed urgency in the…

When Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer painted Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid in 1670–1671 from his house in Delft, the Netherlands, little did he know that 300 years later, Rose Dugdale, an English PhD graduate in economics, would cut the painting out of its frame with a screwdriver and lug it back to her rented cottage in rural Ireland. Vermeer is today acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, even though only 36 paintings survive, one of which is Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, a radiant interior scene, typical of Vermeer who painted most of his works from the front room of his house in Delft using the same furniture and decorations, simply moved about. It is not known why Vermeer’s…

“We only think when confronted by a problem.”— John Dewey One morning in the early 1970s, a young Irish American from South Boston, who was studying philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, knocked on his teacher’s door. Philosopher Jane Roland Martin opened the door to the news that her student was quitting philosophy for good. “‘Remember the berry season is short.’ I came across this poignant thought the other day in the most pedestrian of places: on the basket our local pick-your-own strawberry farm gives visitors before they hit the fields... What you do with your life will be a function of how you spend the 8,760 hours that make a year, the 700,000 or so that will make a life... Years ago, when I filled out my…

Doing nothing, or in Dutch, niksen, can be good for us and enhance our feelings of creativity, productivity, as well as wellbeing. But it’s not exactly a gender-neutral phenomenon. It turns out it is much easier for men to do nothing than it is for women. Studies show that in heterosexual relationships, men don’t just have more time than women, they are also much better at protecting the free time they have. And what’s more, women protect their husbands’ free time too, even at the expense of their own leisure, as Brigid Schulte discusses in her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Statistics show that while men and women do approximately the same amount of work, men do more paid work while women do…

I grew up in Poland. I am from a big family, or at least, we were four children. But I always felt my hometown was a bit too small, or too boring. I’d always wanted to go to Amsterdam. My parents were probably creative in some way but they didn’t pursue it. But my parents were always supportive of what I did. I had the freedom to just go and do and be what I wanted. They were not like, “You should step in our shoes,” you know. “You have to study law.” They were both lawyers. Instead, I went to art school. I don’t think they really understood what I was doing, but they were like, “Go ahead. You will be fine.” My other siblings, they all studied at…

The word desaparecidos might be familiar even to non-Spanish speakers, as referring to people kidnapped - and never seen again - under oppressive regimes in Central and South America. But many others have gone missing there, and elsewhere, for other reasons. A 2021 report by the International Commission on Missing Persons states that hundreds of thousands go missing each year due to conflicts, mass displacement, natural disasters, human trafficking, organised crime, suicide, and other causes. Between 16,000 and 20,000 people are declared missing annually in the Netherlands alone. Most will be located within a few days; about 20 go missing for longer but are eventually found; around 15 will remain unfound. Kris Kremers, 21, and Lisanne Froon, 22, were from Amersfoort, an attractive city to the east of Amsterdam. They’d…

“All that humankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.” The Woman Who Stole Vermeer By Anthony M. Amore The extraordinary life and crimes of heiress-turned-revolutionary Rose Dugdale, who in 1974 became the only woman to pull off a major art heist. Dugdale’s life is singularly notorious. Born into extreme wealth, she abandoned her life as an Oxford-trained PhD and heiress to join the cause of Irish Republicanism. In 1974, she led a gang into the opulent Russborough House in Ireland and made off with millions in prized paintings, thus became - to this day - the only woman to pull off a major art heist. The Yellow House By Martin Gayford From October to December 1888 a pair…

For much of European history, it was presumed that black swans did not exist, only white ones. A ‘black swan’ was an expression to describe an impossibility, because all swans - as far as Europeans were concerned, had white feathers. That was until Dutch explorers led by Willem de Vlamingh spotted black swans in Western Australia, and news of the black swan made its way back to Holland. The expression ‘black swan’ is used today to describe an event that is difficult to predict but has large consequences for humanity, one example being the rise of the internet. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on this concept in his book, The Black Swan, arguing that we humans spend the bulk of our time fixated on known facts, categorising and simplifying the…

At age 40, Hendrik Kerstens owned a wine importing store in the Netherlands. He loved the romance of food and wine but didn’t enjoy the commercial side of the business. He wanted to spend his time doing something more creative. As he saw it, his whole life was creative, except in a professional sense. So when his daughter Paula was born he asked his wife what she thought about the idea of him launching into something creative full-time. She said, “You know, that’s fine. So, I will go to work full-time and you can do the housekeeping and raise Paula.” So, they agreed. While Hendrik studied photography during the day and cared for Paula, his wife worked full-time in a pharmacy. “So, we changed roles,” he says. His original thought…

“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are,” once wrote José Ortega y Gasset. The Spanish philosopher could well have put it, “tell me on what you expend your energy and I will tell you who you are”. Because it’s how we use our limited sources of energy that matters - such as, do we employ it on online shopping, checking our phone, or philosophising on the meaning of life? When asked, Why don’t you spend more time doing the things you love?, be it creative endeavours, or hiking in the mountains, the usual response is, “because I am exhausted!” Once the necessities of life have been dealt with - the kids fed and dressed and put to bed, or the university assignments…

I have started a foster home with my husband. We have seven children. The youngest is a foster child, then we have our own biological daughter, Eva, and then three foster children at primary school. Benno [my partner] has two children of his own, so my stepchildren, 9 and 13, live here half the time. And the foster kids live here full-time; except one, who also spends time with his previous foster parents. I was born in Groningen. My parents were both in youth care, so I think that’s a part of why we are doing this now. My mother did a Bachelor’s in Social Work. She worked with children who were in juvenile institutions. My father did the same, but then he did a Master’s in Social Science. They…

Details Closing date: 25 January 2022 Format: One artwork per entry. Painting, drawing, collage, digital art etc. - all accepted. Applicants: Entries must also include a separate photo of an edition of Womankind. File size: Please send large file sizes (larger than 3,000 pixels wide, 300dpi). Photos of entries must be provided in file sizes suitable for publishing. The theme of this quarter is ‘still life’, derived from the Dutch word stilleven. Objects may include flowers, fruits, vegetables, books, shells, rocks, and so on. Win $500 and get published in the next issue of Womankind magazine. OPEN TO ALL READERS. For full details visit: womankindmag.com/award Send to: award@womankindmag.com…

Shop at - womankindmag.com/shop The Museum of Art & Philosophy (MAP) is the second physical art gallery for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the world, and showcases over a decade’s worth of digital artwork from internationally-renowned artists. Own a piece of Womankind art history by viewing some of the collection at womankindmag.com/shop. Digital artworks for sale at MAP are unique assets represented by the digital certificate of ownership, or NFT, that accompanies artwork purchases. Buyers of the artwork receive both the digital file, the NFT, and the framed artwork. Postage costs and larger framing requests are in addition to stated prices.…