What caught our eye when we were shopping for a barge, was the artwork on our Skûtsje. It was unusual as most tjalks and skûtsjes had traditional artwork that has been around for centuries. The previous owner Henk van der Zon located an elderly Friesian lady at a boat show.
She carved facades and klicks for skûtsjes using her style, a form of primitive art. Undecided on what he should put on the facade she asked for his last name, which is van der Zon, meaning from the Sun. She came up with this beautiful inverted representation of the water cycle. Now nearly forty years later, the artist remains unknown, but we love the bright colours she had chosen.
The barge was named Nieuwe Zorg, which means new cares or concerns; we wanted to change the name into something more uplifting. I asked our broker how one went about changing a boat's name in the Netherlands. His answer came quickly: "with a brush!"
To match the image and, with a bit of play on words we changed her name to Zonder Zorg, meaning without care or carefree. We had new boards cut to size and I did the layout and started chiselling.
I duplicated the colours from the facade and applied the final touches to the yellow sun; the brushed flipped onto my favourite trousers. I disguised the stains with embroidered butterflies, a new form of Skûtsje Art.
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