Skärhamn / Nordic Water Colour Museum

On Wednesday morning, 9 August (not too early), we set off on our two days trip to the west coast. Basically we had a choice of two roads to get from here to where we wanted to go. To avoid going into Gothenburg (2nd largest city in Sweden), P decided on the upper, slightly longer route via Alingsås, which would take us via the northern outskirts. Turned out a wise choice, also because of the heavy rain flooding some places in the southern parts of Gbg. (When we reached the E6 motorway along the coast, we met a long queue standing still in the other direction, towards the city...)

 I think this is probably from where we joined the motorway... (12:12)

(12:48) Crossing the bridge over to the island Tjörn.

 Half an hour later, we had arrived at our first destination, Skärhamn, and Nordiska Akvarellmuseet (The Nordic Watercolour Museum). Because of rain and wind and umbrellas and whatnot, I seem to have missed getting a photo of my own of the building from the outside. But here is one I 'snipped' from their website:

We were hungry by then, so started our visit by having lunch in their restaurant. It was rather full but luckily we did not have to wait too long to get a table.

We both chose "fish and chips". They also had "child's portion" of this dish on the menu (at a lower price) and I was bold enough to ask if I could have that even though I was clearly not a child... (The thing is, I hardly ever manage to finish a full "normal" restaurant portion of anything, so always end up leaving a lot on the plate when eating out.) I could, and the small portion was certainly big enough for me, even though it was delicious!

Having finished our lunch, we were ready for our tour of the museum. I have to confess I was a little bit disappointed with it, as I had expected them to also have a permanent exhibition of what the name suggests - i.e. works by Nordic water colour artists. Turned out that they constantly change their exhibitions though, and not all that much of what was on display just now was typical water colour paintings. (Had I studied their website more carefully beforehand, I would have known that, but when planning the trip I mainly just checked opening hours etc.) Worth a visit anyway of course - even if it did not quite live up to all my expectations...

Their exhibition this summer is called Animal Kingdom, and the first room we entered had this impressive installation of a gazillion brown butterflies...

They also had on display 18th century botany books with drawings/water colours of plants by the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus in Latin) (and maybe some others as well).

Systema Naturae is one of the major works of the Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and introduced the Linnaean taxonomy. (Link to Wikipedia article.)

 

Walton Ford, La Madre, 2017

In one room there were some really huge paintings (I doubt they were water colour). The one above was the one that I liked the best. It was hard to snap photos as the museum was crowded and there were lots of people everywhere all the time.  

Another room was filled with weird-looking sculptures. The room was dark with the light (spotlights) shifting all the time. Below is the only shot I managed:

It was still rainy and windy outside when we got out of the museum. I managed a few more photos of the marina on our way back to the car, though. (15:05)

 

Linking to