The hardest of all worlds Painting

From May 11 to August 25, 2024 I will be participating in the exhibition "Miniartures", an initiative of FIKVA (Figurative Art Today) and the WG Gallery in Dordrecht where the show takes place. For further information see A few years ago Iwas honoured with a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York! (#pk-recipients) "Because of the exceptional quality of your work and the extent of your artistic achievements"; as they put in the grant letter. I am very proud to have been selected by this renowned institution. -------------------------------------------------------------------- I am working as a professional artist since 1991. I've 'participated in many exhibitions over the years, mainly in Holland. For a number of years now I am creating works that are painted by using graduations of only one color: Prussian blue (mixed with titanium white). With them I make all the tones from deep dark blue to almost white. This self-imposed restriction is aimed at the coherence of different shapes within a painting and also to give the work a less anecdotal and more monumental character. The largest part of my work consist of a series of paintings that are called “Ruins”. They show the results of war for instance, but also the effect that global warming and climate change are having on our lives. It is the disaster I am most worried about as it is already happening now in real life and not in some distant futuristic doom scenario. I hope my work can contribute to more action being taken to confront and hopefully solve this immense problem. With the limited color range I paint a baroque profusion of spots on the canvas, that take on the form of collapsed houses, aircraft wrecks, ruined palaces etc. My idea when painting is to proceed slowly and controlled, leaving a clear trace of paint that looks like congealed matter. The line that runs from one to the other painting is an interest in the cohesion of matter on any scale. After the initial setup of the painting by making a pencil sketch, I work out the shapes by starting with the clearest outlines. From one to the next, I fill the canvas with spots of different brightness. The often extremely vague light-dark transitions are at odds with the actual tone of the paint that seeks clear outlines. I have been influenced by painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, Jacques-Louis David, Lucian Freud, Wilhelm Sasnal, Luc Tuymans (whom I've met once at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam) and Gerhard Richter.