"See the sunny skies" Painting

Rob van Hoek September 2012

Born 1957
Autodidact
Professional artist since 1993
Numerous exhibitions in leading Dutch galleries, as well as in galleries in the United Kingdom (London ,Oxford, Newcastle), Denmark and France (St.Malo).
My paintings have been shown at International art fairs (The Netherlands, UK, Belgium, France).

Artist Statement

Subject
During all my years of painting I have been inspired by the landscape, especially the cultivated landscape. Wild, rough and virginal landscapes are beautiful too, but no subject of my paintings.

The patterns, lines, rhythms and shapes of (harvested) fields, a line of trees along a road, a solitaire tree in a field, the houses which liven up the countryside; these are a few items that make the cultivated landscape so inspiring to me. And of course the sky above, adding space and atmosphere.

Perspective is used in a playful way; sometimes flat, sometimes with depth, often both, and together with an emphasis on figurative details, it gives the paintings a more or less naive character.

Painting Technique
On the canvas I put at least 5 or 6 layers of white, gesso-like paint. The brush strokes of these layers give a nice structure. Because I use transparent oil paint in several very thin layers, the structure remains visible, adding much atmosphere to the painting.

Instead of adding the paint precisely with a brush, I work the other way around; I put on a lot of paint and then I carefully remove some of it, while "drawing" in the wet paint with a brush, the backside of a brush, a cloth, a tissue, a Q-tip or whatever is suitable for making the lines, the forms, the dots etc.


The Titles
All the titles I use are lines (or parts of lines) from song lyrics. Mostly from pop music, sometimes a title of a jazz song. There are so many references to the landscape to be found, (and the sky, the weather, the time of day, the time of year, and so on), which I thankfully use.
Usually I give the title to the painting when it is finished, browsing through my collection of songlines and selecting the most appropriate one. But sometimes I make a painting with a particular songline in mind.
Working from this concept is inspired the novel "The Songlines", by Bruce Chatwin.