Trip to Valle de Angeles and Honduran Art!!! :)

19/2/11
Kristen says...

(Are you getting tired of me yet? I swear Chris hasn't given up on blogging! You will hear from him again!)

I am still on a bit of a shopping high, so this post may be filled with more !'s and ( )'s than normal...oh yeah, and probably quite a few ...'s as well...
I love to shop (Chris, predictably, does not), and I especially love to shop when Chris lets me buy things...it's not that he's tyrannical and never let's me spend money, it's just that he's very level-headed and thinks about things logically. The words "Do you really need that?" are oft-spoken when we are shopping together. Even today, when we were on a mission to spend, he asked me, "Do you think you couldn't find anything similar to that in any other part of the world?" I put it back.

But I did get to buy things...actually quite a few things, which is awesome! Even more awesome is that we agreed on what to buy! Chris and I have VERY different styles of decorating (as I may have mentioned before)...he likes simple, solid, and (in my opinion) boring things...watch the music video for Kanye West's "Love Lockdown"...that is Chris' dream home. I, on the other hand, like pattern, and color, and (in Chris' opinion) busy things.

Plus, I have been BLESSED with a husband who actually cares how the house is decorated...something I hear most women don't have to deal with...(no comment)

So, it's hard to decorate our home.

I compromised with the curtains (I did not really want the solid, boring maroon curtains in my bedroom, but I figured Chris would, so...there you go. They look fine...) and we went into today with the understanding that we were going to buy some art that we BOTH liked.

We found it!!! Paintings!

We didn't go to Valle looking for paintings. (In fact, I went for a wooden mask, which I got...
...and a big Lenca pot or two (which I didn't get, because I think we are going to a factory one of these days.)

We looked at a few of the places we always look, the big tourist-central places, but didn't really find anything we HAD to have...it was the same thing at each place, and we wanted something truly representative of Honduras.

We turned up another road (actually looking for the place with the masks) and noticed some paintings and paused. As many of the shop owners do, a woman beckoned us in, "Passe adelante," and so we passe-d.

And found ourselves in a painting wonderland! I think we knew within about 3 minutes that we had found our art. The artist, Franklin, had a really neat style of painting that Chris and I were both instantly attracted to. For me, a lot was about the medium--I love the look (and feel) of oil paintings. For Chris, I'm not sure, but I think a lot of it was the simplicity of the images. Franklin paints in lines, and he makes great things with those lines. For example, the one I call "Aves"
Sweet, right?! It's going in our bedroom, because it matches with both the maroon and the green.

We ended up buying 5 paintings (and he gave us a sixth as "un regalo"). Two will be somewhere in the sala/dining room:
This will be in Chris' office:
(It's Amapala, with a guy chilling in a hammock...very representative of our trips to the Island, and something to inspire him to work harder so we can go again ;)

We also bought a small picture of flowers for the kitchen (it matches our towels) and were given a picture of pesces (I liked it, Chris didn't) because we'd bought so many (I assume):



















There were, believe it or not, a few paintings left over when we left (more to buy next time!!):
And one we WILL be buying (maybe even Monday, if I get up the gumption to drive back)
This will be going over our TV in the sala, and will be Chris' anniversary present from me (we'll have 5 years this summer.) Hopefully it doesn't get sold before we can go back :-S

Here's Chris and Franklin (or "Picasso" as he signed a few of our paintings. I think he was happy :)
We talked a bit with him, and he is native Honduran, went to art school here, and paints Honduras. He had a huge red and yellow painting of Copán on the wall, of course the Amapala picture, and others of Honduras, as well as just some randoms...it was great!!

Anyway, so we bought some art. I also took some pictures...Valle de Angeles is really a nice little town, just a beautiful place to get a coffee and enjoy the beautiful Honduran weather:


























We also stopped for food on the way, at a delicious restaurant called Criollos...I believe we have talked about Criollos before, (you can see it from our balcony) but today we went to the Criollos on the way to Valle...and boy was it worth the stop! Not only was the food good, but the view was delicious!!





PS: The delicious-looking cheesy goodness to the right is called anafre...and it's amazingly amazing!!

I have for you below a close-up of the food and the heating mechanism: coals:










DEE-LICOUS!!!







This is how I feel after today...

Also, because I can, here are pictures of my handsome men:













Have a good one!
KF