Magnetic Village

The theme of Tilman for februari is Magenetic Village. Excellent theme! It brings the abstract and not drawable "magnetic" in contact with a very tangible notion of "village".
At first i started drawing buildings in the grip of a circular magnetic field. See how nice gloomy the picture becomes on this brown paper, and look at the fine lines, that will be different soon!

But something went wrong: it became a city. The theme was village. Then i noticed that "village" and magnetic are contradictory, in the sense that all in a village is at a certain comfortable distance. Also, the villages are abandoned for the cities, the village does not attract any more. Only the old, those weary of life or green dreamers will be resettling villages. (All of the former is applicable to me, i would love to live in a village, but there are no villages left in Holland, it is just a big city interspersed with some parks, and heavily subsidized cows...).
So maybe is a magnetic village something that lies in the countryside and makes aircraft deviate down to the tower of the church? Nice idea too, but it does point too much to religion. Always somebody will be offended and likely to throw bombs immediately. (But even if we please these fragile religious tows, we will suffer even more from irresponsible well paid financial people so why bother anyway?) My village is too nice for that! (For bombers and for financial bureaucrats-rats alike.) I decided otherwise. I started drawing buildings, and placing them glued together by the magical force of the magnetic.

But i didn't like the drawings..terrible! There should be another way to do this, more easily to be shifted around...Then I got myself organized and started preparing drawings, more illustrations and assembling them, in a village setting. Nicely spaced.

Small roads connecting every building...Oh you want trees: that can be arranged, yes trees very much belong to a village :

Then the force strikes: all buildings get magically magnetic and glue together:

It didn't really satisfy me. May be this is too much hardship for a village! See, i mentioned the fine lines above - but in the last drawings the lines are really rude. Cartoon style. I opted for these lines myself, true: a village is sort of a cartoon. Life is not that nice anymore, it is raw, everybody wants to ripe you of, city jungle. The autonomous artist in me (that is the one who wants to make incomprehensible drawings) likes more the backside of the paper on which the houses were sketched then the front:

so in the end i had to abandon the village, the buildings were closed by wood, nails and planks.....poor buidlings!

So far the village. The next theme will be (i thought of global village, green village, indeed abandoned village, a heavily subsidized cow, but no...) it will be: city jungle!
But i do not want to leave you in this very desolate state, i want to let you dream for a moment, before jumping into real bad life again, let's us look for a last glimpse in the village pond, what do we see to say goodbye?: magnetic village......but mirrored in the waves made by ducks wich small chicks, peacefully deformed all the time, dream on dream on dream on.........