Pauline van de Ven

Pauline van de Ven

Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands

About Pauline van de Ven

I am a digital painter exploring the new medium of vector. Vector-art is a cooperation between the artist and the computer. Lines, forms and colors are made by the hand of the artist and the computer influences them in a certain way. Behind the screen, it ties all handmade lines and patches of color to mathematical formulas, known as Bezier curves. This gives them more simplicity, more contrast and a higher resolution than can be achieved by hand. Colors are pure monochromes or very fine computer-calculated gradients. While there is hardly any art in vector yet, its amazing property of fixed resolution - a vector image can be blown up to any size without becoming blurred - makes it popular in advertising. -----------------------------------------------------------------At first I rejected the bold appearance of the medium. ‘Ceci est un oeuf’ (2015) expresses the dislike. Hard lines, monochrome colors and perfect gradients seemed to limit the emotional palette to messages of simple happiness and joy famous from Matisse’s cut-outs, or the brutal surrealistics of a Daly, while I am more attracted to the soft nuance of the Bonnards, Vuillards, Sisleys or De Staels, Vermeers silent here-and-now and the introvert abstracts of artists like Schoonhoven and Van der Leck. Still, vector is the only form of cooperation between the artist and the computer that offers a new language of form and color while leaving the artist in charge. To the left we have digital raster painting, the most commonly practiced form of digital painting, where the artist is fully in charge but forms and color differ in no way from a traditional painting of oil on canvas. To the right we find forms of digital painting that offer substantial renewal, but the computer takes the lead. As a result, these images become impersonal and repetitive and, in my view, emotionally void. Compared to our own soul, the soul of a machine is a very flimsy thing. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I have been looking for ways to give vector some of the soft nuance and broader range of expression of raster. This seemed to work if I restrained colors to a bare minimum of black-and-white gradients and one monochrome color. Now at last I am happy with vector, especially with the last works, Waiting, Diner, Thoughts, Rainy day, Woman. For as long as I am happy with any development, which is usually not very long. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I stress that this development is merely a technical one and of little importance. It has only to do with how I express things. What I express is always the same, a personal reflection on the eternal present. Not one of my paintings is in the past. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Fortunately, the joy is in the making, not the selling. I am grateful for the recognition of three honors from the Museum of Computer Art (MOCA) and a Lorenzo award for digital painting at the Florence Biennale in 2015. Met with broad misconception and accidental humiliation, I have made a strong effort to promote the understanding of digital painting. Most importantly, it is necessary to explain that for all honest digital art, what you hang on the wall is and can only be, a print. There is a common misunderstanding that a print cannot be unique. It certainly can. ‘Digital Painting, explained and illustrated’ (2013-18) is now in the Public Domain and can be found at www.digitalpainting.be It is good to see that expertise is growing and digital painting is slowly maturing. I have no doubt that somewhere in the near future, on a clear day in spring, its strong buds will burst and bloom. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Pauline van de Ven, April-May 2018.

Education:

I am self-taught. My transition to digital painting has been sudden and final, triggered by the purchase in 2004 of a Palm TX handheld computer. Before that, I had practiced watercolor, linocut, and mono-print of etching ground on glass. The Palm had a tiny painting program ‘Notepad’ with only three brush-tips, a one-size eraser, no redo button and one color, black. I never touched a real brush again. I painted in digital raster, the only thing you could do with a TX. Over the years I happily experimented with a great number of painting programs using Apple desktop and iPad. I combined raster with vector by working simultaneously in two painting programs and found what I was looking for. After a while I explored vector-only.

Events:

-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.)