Heart of Darkness Painting

About Ray Voeten Born and raised in the land of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Mondrian and De Kooning art came very natural to Ray Voeten. He has been painting and visiting museums ever since he can remember. After growing up in the south of Holland he started his career in Amsterdam and is living and working there since 1989. He attended the prestigious Rietveld International Academy of Fine arts in Amsterdam, were he skipped a year and graduated in 1992. His work relates to the modern art in the late twentieth century, where his greatest heroes are Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol, and more recently Anselm Kiefer and Peter Doigt. In his work Ray Voeten tries to put common objects and scenes in a situation that moves people, as Cezanne did with his apples, Warhol with his still lives and Thibaut with his cakes. Art is to Ray Voeten a common image put in an new perspective, that makes it emotionally touching to the viewer. His scenes are often cinematic where ordinary situations get a dramatic atmosphere by the magic of the paint. His work can be found in private and corporate collections both in Holland and internationally. Artist statement His career has several episodes, with each its specific subject and painting techniques. From still lives to models to landscapes and back again; and from oil to acrylics to industrial gloss paint. Ray starts sketching his ideas on a computer using photoshop software. By changing a common image he creates the atmosphere he wants to express, creating a dramatic underlayer to the common scenery. Hereby he introduces accidents and coincidence in his paintings by dripping, splashing and flowing the paint onto the canvas. By creating this relation between the common and the dramatic, Ray explores the beauty in small things that makes life worthwhile. Ray Voeten: “…Sometimes I surprise myself in a painting I made. This overwhelms me like a state of happiness: it is addicting and it is what keeps me going on making art.Like a superhero discovering his superpowers for the first time: “Wow, did I do that? Just imagine what else I can do with these powers…!” A full catalog was made regarding the first 20 years of Rays career with a preface by Drs. D. Pappers, art historian.