What is art if not an adventure.

I started a new series of volcano paintings. The commission of one inspired me to start a new chapter, to shake things up.

Maybe I felt a bit too safe lately; the need to brake with security and comfort presented itself.

Consequently I feel lost and that is positive. Art should be like hopping from one melting ice floe to the next melting one, hoping to one day reach solid ground (which will never happen).

To see what I am about, where I can cling to, I went through old stuff this weekend. I found these three sketches. In this period (around 1988) the works of Frank Auerbach were still an inspiration, especially his drawings.

I got to know his work through a dance teacher in Florence way back in 1981. She had studied with him. For a couple of years I went to her classes to draw the dancers. I used to buy A4 sheets of paper by the pound. I drew as fast as I could, one after the other, trying to capture the moment, the gestures.

I threw away at least 99 %; it was sweaty fun.

In 1988 and back in Amsterdam I worked with a model and these three drawings (see below) are a result. I worked in a violent way, went to the limit with drawing and erasing, beating up the paper. Very much done with the ‘Frank Auerbach mentality’. Frenatic movement is present. Even the reclining nude shows action.

I love to work with charcoal, even if afterwards all is black dust, my hands, hair, nose, neck and ears.

In oil I went the same way; it resulted in for example ‘Tiger Woman’. Movement and suggestion, referring to dance: she does a split up.

It brings back memories…

THE ITALY YEARS.

In the first period of my three years in Florence I continued painting according a Rubens recipe for how to work found in Max Doerner’s book about painting. I had come up with that technique when I frequented the academy. Next to that, I painted in a sort of impressionist way, but then with broad brushstrokes.

I found out that if I used these broad brushstrokes, it got me into trouble when I wanted to concentrate on the resemblance. So I hopped back and forth and sometimes fell in between...

But the broad brushstrokes helped to play with the space, the void and the volumes in the paintings. In the first big canvas with dancers I went there for the solution. Dance is not just movement; it is also materializing the space that is around the dancer.

It was the first painting I sold in Italy and by one of the biggest collectors and supporters of my work. The last big fun together with the collector was when I produced the works for the church he designed.

MORE OR LESS ONE STYLE.

Around 1990 the two styles merged. For years I moved on one track.

But the inevitable had to happen. The idea that all is possible and that I admire so many paintings done in different styles made me go in more than one direction. Nowadays I have fun in than this way of painting and then in another. To blame (or the excuse) are my portraits and the flower paintings: likeness and light.  

WE DON’T LIKE CONFUSION.

People want you to be recognizable; they don’t like you to be puzzled or searching, especially not at a high age. Life is already too much chaos…

I can understand that when I think of painters like Velazquez or Goya. Until the period of Delacroix and Ingres, everybody was sort of looking in the same direction. The Western worldview was quite linear.

With and around Picasso the story has changed. He went through I don’t know how many different styles and even painted in different ways at the same moment.

I am a child of my time and so my view on the world is scattered thanks to the many different prisms through which we see.

I am not a big hero in science but what I understood is that we are now at a level that the way we look at an object is defined by the instrument we use and the outcome we search for. Even there experts come up with more than one solution. 

This is why I often feel bored when seeing artists preforming the same old trick as a mentally dead elephant. Why always play the same game; why put yourself to sleep…

Why show your process as a linear one, with the terminus station… This is a lie. That’s why I don’t belief the showing of the process he went through by Mondrian. To me it is a fake freak show of a dogmatic preacher. He put it together after having gone through his evolution, showing the linear walk through life.

Apart from defining, art is also very much suggesting, leaving space for interpretation, imagination. Let the emotion in, get confused… and there semi scientific explanations fall through. There is no holy aim anymore, not just one paradise.

I realized once more while making the volcano commission that art is lying a truth. Not showing the 'real truth'. It doesn't work that way… and even less art has to do with the logic approach, the approach without the 'AHA Erlebnis'. There's a lot of fruit that needs to fall on our heads in order to make great art.

Here is another painting (photo unfortunately of a bad quality) from my Italy years. Click on it to hear music..

March 16 2022, Utrecht.