Udona Boerema / Barend Cornelis Koekkoek

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek

Boomrijk landschap bij ondergaande zon

1850

oil on panel 

32,6 x 29,2 cm

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek

Eikenbos 

1856 

oil on canvas

134 x 157 cm

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen 

 

 

In the woods nearby my house I mostly find piece in mind. My mind is always a busy mind, a lot of thinking going on. To clear my head I like to go running for several kilometers or walk our dogs for hours in the woods.

It seems that trees have a slowing and calming effect on my brain.

 

And when the light in the forest touches the leaves and branches of the trees, beautiful shadows, shapes, hues and colors are formed on everything it touches, colors I'm afraid I could never paint or even put words to to describe them.

 

These colors and shapes have a huge effect on me, thought and image immerse themselves in a whole new world, my world.

 

And as I stand among all these shapes and colors, it suddenly dawns on me that these still, sturdy but vibrant trees have been here for years, decades and probably even longer. As if time has stood still and nothing changes here, as if I am standing and taking a seat in a painting by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek.

The forests in Twente are interspersed by the scenic landscape with and without some cattle, including some cows, sheep and chickens. Brilliant and without any mechanical presence also timeless, stunningly beautiful.

 

For me, BC Koekkoek captures the light so beautifully in his paintings, the way he draws and paints shapes and colors. As if he gives the trees a character, they look like quirky personalities who are the main characters in a painting that makes all the painted people fade into the background.

 

Udona Boerema, 2022

Udona Boerema 

Zonder titel 

2020 

transparant binder and acrylic paint on linen

200 x 160 cm 

Udona Boerema (NL)

Zonder titel

2022 

transparant binder and acrylic paint on linen 

160 x 140 cm 

www.udonaboerema.com 

Patrick Ceyssens / Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke

Untitled, from the series São Paulo

1975

chemically manipulated gelatin silver print

124,8 × 141,6 cm

 

 

 

Images are the new thinking, visual thinking is the new way of thinking

Extra memory space is added to reinforce visual reminiscences. We never remember something the same way twice. Indeed, memory seizes so much more than only a fleeting image of reality and new memories are painted over the old ones. You have to imagine how inside of our head there is a constant rivalry between different memory contents that come up for air. But which one do we allow to surface first? Our memory cannot be compared to a hard drive. Nothing we save and retrieve remains unchanged. Recollection traces are either cleaned up or impaired. Our memories are part of the future, and so we will start ‘using’ these images. Recollection thus becomes the treasury of imagination. And when you furthermore think of how deeply they are swayed by emotions, we find ourselves drawn into an ever-changing ‘mind movie’.  

 

Patrick Ceyssens, 2022

Patrick Ceyssens (BE)

You can see it everywhere #4

2022

oil, spraypaint, pencil, print on canvas 

150 x 180 cm

www.patrickceyssens.com

Annemieke Alberts / Van Ruysdael-Bacon-Piranesi

 

In short, my work is about the suggestion of spatiality that I want to render as clearly as possible with paint on a canvas. With difficulty, I made a selection of very diverse greats including musicians and composers in both classical, jazz and pop fields. In this blog, I have limited myself to three visual artists from art history. 

Jacob van Ruysdael

View of Haarlem with bleaching fields

1670-1675

oil on canvas

62,2 × 55,2 cm

Annemieke Alberts 

True colours

2022

acrylic and oil on canvas

100 x 120 cm

 

 

There are paintings that are ingrained in the collective memory of most art lovers and artists. You know them so well that you don’t actually look closely anymore. But then suddenly you can see a work from a different perspective. For example, when you are looking for solutions to a substantive problem with a new work. At that time, I was searching for another way to give form to spatiality.

This is how I rediscovered the work of Jacob van Ruysdael: 'Gezicht op Haarlem met bleekvelden'. It was on the cover of an artbook. Suddenly I saw it with different eyes. The way in which he emphasizes the vastness of the landscape in the painting and takes you as a viewer via the bleaching fields to the horizon is obvious but surprising at the same time. They lie like illuminated refuge hills inviting you to rest for a moment before you move on to what is to be experienced in the distance.

 

It inspires me how you can see that feature almost as an abstract form within an otherwise figurative and realistic painting. It has encouraged me to make use of similar forms in my work. Shapes that in another context could be seen as abstractly geometric but now can act as a resting point between everything that is happening in and with the paint concerning layering, handwriting, movement. Independent of any representation. It has also encouraged me not to distinguish between abstract or figuration. 

What also struck me was the beauty of silence in the work. Something I am always looking for in my work as well. Beauty that touches you, something that transcends opinions about what art should be.

Francis Bacon

In memory of George Dyer

1971

oil on canvas

each panel 198 x 147,5 cm

Francis Bacon

Man in Blue

1954

oil on canvas

197 x 135 cm

Annemieke Alberts

The view

2013

acrylic and oil on canvas

120 x 150 cm

 

 

Someone who applied this fact frequently in his somewhat later work is Francis Bacon. If you were to leave aside the fact that his work is precisely about people, but look purely at how he renders his figures (forms) with a firm stroke, and where paint is allowed to be matter, and in addition places densely painted abstract forms to indicate space, then there is also (in addition to the interesting subjects) on the formal plane much to experience. What touches me in his work is the inability of his portrayed figures to relate to their surroundings. The inner struggle has turned inside out in my experience.

Piranesi

Untitled (called The Drawbridge)

plate VII (of 16) from the series The Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri d'Invenzione)

1761

etching with engraving

54,6 x 41,6 cm

Annemieke Alberts

U.S.O. unidentified standing objects 

2017

acrylic and oil on canvas 

160 x 180 cm

 

 

In Piranesi’s work I recognize the fascination with complex and layered spaces. Spaces that evoke confusion because they give the impression of being impossible in reality. With the difference that Piranesi’s work is graphic and composed of lines. I also often paint away complex pieces that are still visible under the top layer, and his work is much more detailed than mine.

In this painting (U.S.O), previously painted spaces under the top layer are still more or less visible.

 

Annemieke Alberts, 2022

 

www.annemiekealberts.nl

Alexandra Roozen / George Seurat

George Seurat

Jeune fille: Étude pour Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte

1884/85

conté crayon on paper

31,2 x 16,2 cm

George Seurat

The gateway

1882/84

conte crayon on paper

24,8 × 32,2 cm

George Seurat

Madame Seurat, the Artist’s Mother

1882/83

conté crayon on Michallet paper

30,5 x 22,9 cm

 

 

 

"French artist Georges Seurat (b. 1859; d. 1891), the pioneer of the Pointillist pictorial movement, took drawing to new heights that ensured him a place among the great masters of the technique. […] Something apparently so simple as a piece of paper acquires great transcendence in Seurat’s drawings, as it becomes an element that determines the work in a certain way. The artist feels the material to the point where he makes it talk. What distinguishes great masters is this knowledge of the support, which Seurat almost brings alive, allowing it to absorb exactly the right amount of Conté in each case to create lights, volumes, and contrasts.”

 

Curators Guggenheim/Bilbao: Lucía Agirre and Judith Benhamou

Alexandra Roozen

Two Tone series

2022

pencil, paper

160 x 120 cm

Alexandra Roozen (NL)

Two Tone series

2022

pencil, paper

35 x 25 cm

https://alexandraroozen.com

Aline Thomassen / Ana Mendieta

 

Ana Mendieta

Silueta (image from Yagul)

color photograph

1973

Ana Mendieta

untitled (Death of a Chicken)

photographs from performance

1972

 

 

Naked Woman: Being the Image + Making the Image

 

How different it can be if the human condition is visualized by the eyes and the

feelings and the body of a woman.

 

In Ana Mendieta's work you feel so clearly that the content, the vision of art and life belongs to a woman, while at the same time her powerful performances, photographs and land art transcend into an experience that goes far beyond being a woman.

 

The unconditional surrender to trauma, pain and anger as the incendiary force to expose the human condition made a deep impression on me.

 

I had just graduated from the academy when I discovered Mendieta at a major solo show of her work in Barcelona. Although she used a different medium than painting, that medium I was madly in love with, I saw in her for the first time an artist with whom I felt real affinity.

 

The artist Ana Mendieta turns being a woman into a subversive power; a positive, transformative force, demanding visibility and shriveling the paradigms of the modernist art-historical canon.

 

Aline Thomassen, 2022

Aline Thomassen

untitled

2014

watercolour on paper

249 cm x 154 cm

collection Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht

Aline Thomassen (NL)

untitled

2018

watercolour and pastel on paper

215 x 114 cm

www.alinethomassen.com