Microbes Painting

“And suddenly it’s a mountain” explains Jan Lucker about one of his paintings he shows at his atelier in Steyl. It sounds almost apologetic, as if he can’t do a thing about it. And in some way, it really is like that: “I never meant it to be a landscape and I never thought about that as I was painting it. Not even mountains. Not even before I started the painting.” The question rises, what does he think about before he starts painting. “About nothing. I’m sitting in front of the canvas looking at it. Nothing more. After a while I take a few tubes of paint, which mostly I change later on for some other tubes. At a certain moment I know where to put the first plane, a line or a streak, straight, crooked stroke, whatever. And then something’s added to that. Something comes here, I then think, and there. Until I stop thinking and then it becomes fun, because I can ride along with chance. Every gesture with the brush comes from the one before and leads to the next. It grows. It paints itself, so to speak.” When it’s finished, he often thinks: “Hey, how about that…?” There is almost nothing left of the first streaks. And no, it’s not a mountain. Although you can get that association. It also doesn’t have a message: “It’s color, stains, planes and streaks, big and small, in al imaginable colors.”