Pauline van de Ven

Pauline van de Ven

Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands

About Pauline van de Ven

I am a writer and digital painter exploring the new medium of vector. My work develops in cycles from figurative to abstract and back to figurative. I see a painting as a reflection of the soul. Only if the soul is deep enough the painting will be deep enough. If I look at a painting, depth is really all that matters. My own soul and work are in my blind spot, locked in a place where my words have no access, so I will only talk about vector. Hard lines, monochrome colors and perfect gradients limit the emotional palette of vector. ‘Ceci est un oeuf’ (2015, below) expresses my initial dislike. Still, manual vector is the only cooperation between the artist and the computer that offers a new language of form while leaving the artist in charge. On one side we have digital raster painting, where the artist is fully in charge but forms are in no way different from traditional painting. On the other, computer generated painting such as fractal art offers renewal, but the computer takes the lead. These images are impersonal and repetitive and in my view emotionally void. Compared to our own, the soul of a machine is a flat and flimsy thing. I have been trying to give vector some of the soft nuance and broader range of expression of raster. Also for a practical reason, since working in vector would relieve me from the enlargement of raster paintings which is always a lot of noncreative work. I restrained colors to a minimum of black-and-white gradients, sparingly supplemented with one or two monochromes or gradients. With these clair obscurs I became more or less comfortable with vector, especially with the latest works: Waiting, Diner, Thoughts, Rainy day, Woman. After these I now long for color. The work was recognized by the Museum of Computer Art (MOCA) with a third prize (2014), an honorable mention (2015) and a director’s choice (2017) and the Florence Biennale with a Lorenzo award for digital painting (2015). To promote understanding and straighten out some general misconceptions about digital painting I wrote ‘Digital Painting, explained and illustrated’ (2013-2019) which is now in the Public Domain and can be freely used at www.digitalpainting.be. February 2019

Education:

Self-taught. Before I switched to the computer in 2004 I worked in watercolor, linocut and etching ground on glass. My first painting computer was a Palm TX. It had a tiny painting program ‘Notepad’ with three brush-tips, no redo button and only one color, black. Over the years I experimented with a large number of painting programs using Apple desktop and iPad.

Events:

-Finalist in the annual Expo New York contest of the Circle Art Foundation
-'Director's choice' at the annual digital painting contest of the Museum for Computer Art (MOCA) 2017
-Lorenzo award for digital painting at the Florence Biennale in 2015
-Annual competition award for digital painting, Museum of Computer Art MOCA NY in 2014
- Annual competition award for digital painting, Museum of Computer Art MOCA NY in 2015.
- Halewijn Literary oeuvre award in 2015.

Exhibitions:

-2016 March 1-15 , Amsterdam, Scheltema
-2015 October 7 - 25, Florence Biennale
-2014 January 2015-April 2015 Gallery K16, Amsterdam
-2012 November 27 - December 8, Onishi Galery, New York, USA
-2011 September 10-25, Saatchi-Camaver Kunsthaus, Contemporary art exhibition, Desio Milan, Italy.
-2009 March 14-28, Opera Gallery, 'Dutch contemporary artists', Budapest.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/dealers_galleries/Gallery
-2007 Waanders, Zwolle prentkunst

Collections:
Letterkundig museum Den Haag (NL); private collections in Arlington(USA), Stanford (UK), Tokio, London, Rotterdam, Moscow, Budapest, Vergnolles (Fr.)