On the Way Painting

Peter Heij, born in Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1960. Lives and works in the Auvergne, Puy de Dome, France. Ande before in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He attended the Royal Academy for Art and Design (AKV | St. Joost) at Den Bosch from 1982 to 1987, specialized in painting. During his academic period, he produced works in numerous styles including figurative, expressionistic, and abstract. He continued primarily in realism, practiced from his youth and enriched with his academy experiences. The themes and subjects of some of these post-academy paintings deal with people and the impact of their surroundings on their identities, particularly in the Figures (Gestalten) series. Others endeavour to reconstruct landscapes of the past (the Lostland paintings) or attempt to capture the shapes of the ephemeral (the Skyscapes). A more recent group of works reveals the traces made on a landscape by its inhabitants (Santa Fe footpaths). Created in the same period as the New Mexico group, Peter executed a collection of sketches of faces from memory (Faces). In the Photo paintworks, the realistic images of photographs become enmeshed with painting and other techniques. The captured and unmoving reality is thereby changed, questioned, and placed into a different perspective. The experience of new and changed insights and awareness through elevation above and distance from everyday reality, never completely losing sight of that reality, stands central in his work.