about langzaam leven
Calm you keeplooking at
Langzaam Leven is about attention for what surrounds you. For colour, light, material, and things that are not only beautiful but do something to a room.
why slow
The world is often fast, loud and full.
The world is busy, hard, loud and above all a lot. Nothing grand is set against it. Only a small, warm, carefully composed world where the colours agree, the light is good, and not too much happens.
It does not have to be expensive or special either. Beautiful things around you make you happy, and surprisingly little is needed for that.
The garden, Zuid-Beijerland
There is a great deal of silence.
about els schram
A lifetime of looking,making andcollecting.
What now comes together in Langzaam Leven did not begin in a studio. It has long been there in the way Els Schram looks at colour, houses, gardens, materials and the things around her.
Els has always made, collected and composed. In fashion, as a craft teacher, among old finds from France and Belgium, and later in the houses and gardens she shaped. The form changed, her eye stayed the same: for natural colours, weathered materials, good light and things that do not have to be perfect. In her studio she prefers to work without a fixed plan. She starts somewhere, adds, takes away and looks again. Until it is right.
In the studio
The studio is not a workplace but a warm nest. An organised chaos of materials, finds and things she loves. Once she is sitting there and it is quiet, the work comes by itself, and often quickly.
It rarely starts with an idea. More often with a question: which colours do I feel like today. She works on several things at once, sets something aside, looks again later. And then there is the moment it is finished. That, she says, is just as much the art: stopping in time, leaving it alone, doing nothing more.
Oh, this is beautiful. Done.
when something is right
Composition, colour,light and nature.
Those are the four things it comes down to for her. Not as theory, but as feeling. An object that needs to move slightly to the left. One colour that throws it off. Heights and depths that have to agree. She looks at a painting exactly the way she looks at a group of pots on a table, at a room, at a garden.
Perfection is not the measure. She tells of a run-down attic room in France where the wallpaper was peeling and the lamp was honestly ugly, but the light fell just right. That made the room work. Atmosphere beats finish, and old often beats new.
two houses
Zuid-Beijerlandand the Mani
A farmhouse on the Noorddijk in Zuid-Beijerland, with a garden laid out in beds and a black barn where the work is made. And a house in the hills of the Mani in southern Greece, among the olive trees, with the sea below.
Two places, one eye. The light is different there, the colours are different, but the way of looking is the same: what belongs here, and what can go.
When the composition, the colour and the light are in balance, it feels right.
Why Langzaam Leven exists
There is already enough asking for attention. Enough that wants to be louder. Faster. Bigger.
We believe in what happens when things go quiet. When the light falls well on a wall. When two colours suddenly work side by side. When an old material is given a new life.
Not everything needs a message. Not everything needs to be new. Not everything needs to be perfect. And art does not have to keep its distance.
Sometimes something is beautiful simply because it feels right. Because you want to keep looking at it. Because that one empty wall becomes warmer.
For a little less noise. And a little more beauty around you.
On the name
The name is not about being slow. It is about taking the time to look. Less noise. Less hurry. Less obligation. More attention for what is already there. A work you do not exhaust in one glance belongs to that: it keeps giving something back, even after a year on the same wall.
