Constantin Brancusi
wooden sculpture
1920
I have a lot heroes and inspiration is to be found everywhere. One of them is Constantin Brancusi: "Simplicity Is Complexity Resolved''. It’s about finding the solution that is perfectly natural and true. It appears to be so simple that anybody could do it. This inspiration is an encouragement that keeps me moving forward.
Katrin Bremermann, 2021
Katrin Bremermann
No; 2041
2020
40,5 x 29,7 cm
enamel on waxed paper
Robert Rauschenberg
Collection
1954/1955
fabric, metal, oil, paper and wood on canvas
203,2 x 243,8 x 8,89 cm
collection SF MOMA
Robert Rauschenberg
Bed
1955
oil and pencil on pillow, quilt and wood supports
191,1 x 80 x 20,3 cm
collection SF MOMA
When I saw the work of Robert Rauschenberg in my student years (1980) I was very touched by the fresh colors, unusual materials he used and the free way of painting.
I still think his work and his ideas about painting are topical.
I’ve always been a big fan of Robert Rauschenberg and that undoubtedly influenced me strongly in the use of colors. How I paint is influenced by graphic design through my education.
Daniël Peetermans, 2021
Daniël Peetermans
What is behind Yellow?
2021
oil on canvas
30 x 40 cm
Daniël Peetermans (BE)
Blue under construction
2021
oil, acrylics, spray paint on multiplex
20 x 26 cm
www.instagram.com/daniel.peetermans
rk
Fernando Pessoa
In 1991 I exchanged my small home village in Twente for Amsterdam. From this moment on the magnitude of things was solely defined by my hunger for the arts instead of by dogmas of religious zealots. I proved insatiable for all new perspectives the world of art created!
Yet, although I loved every angle of it, I also remained aloof. As if I couldn't climb my own threshold. My niece, just graduated from Willem de Kooning in Rotterdam and sharing a similar religious background, gave me Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' (Boek der Rusteloosheid).
Pessoa turned out to be a stepping stone. His words gave me a map and a compass and showed the connection between what I saw and how I thought about it. Up to this day, his book functions as a travel companion. Not one week passes without me leafing through it and loosing myself in one of his many poems.
Fernando Pessoa is a poet able of grasping the impotence in man's existence and the impossibility of making sense of it in a single sentence, but at the same time he does this with a tremendous zest for life and a fearlessness that, to me, is precisely spot on. How to be human is the question and the quest that, unconsciously at one time, yet way more consciously nowadays, forms the basis of my work.
"All I am is nothing more than a ravine
In which a dim light
through which I know I am, without appearances,
directs me darkly.
Something in between being and non-being
and inhabited by me,
like the dust that rises in the wind
lives only when it shows it."
The Book of Disquiet
Pessoa guided me into the act of actively not knowing. In doing so he defined my necessity as a maker profoundly. My drawings start off exactly where my knowing or understanding ceases. Pessoa shows me in his many wanderings, being the keen observer and the pessimist that he was, the fabulous magic of everyday life.
"It would be more correct to say that a state of the soul is a landscape; that sentence is better in that it does not contain the lie of a theory, but only the truth of a metaphor…”
The Book of Disquiet
His choice to speak as different characters also inspired me.
Pessoa wrote many of his works as heteronyms; different characters who worked independently and used different forms and languages. Pessoa disintegrated on his paper, and his strength stemmed from this disintegration.
In this fragmentation of his identity I found the space to investigate completely different styles. Why must everything be reduced to one hand of drawing?
In the past year, a period connotating and denoting my accordance and relation to global prowess regarding Covid19, Pessoa pushed me to go and try something completely new. Since the start of the crisis, I have been drawing a small observation every day and unworrying whether it fits into the rest of my oeuvre. Every day my hand acts like a seismograph of my mood. Just like Pessoa acted after his daily wanderings through the city throughout all seasons. His writings a gauge of an inner heartbeat and necessity.
To observe and to render a picture of what this time does to me and us. Little visual notes, Consolation Pieces, which I “give back to the world on social media every day” was something he certainly helped overcome my own barriers.
Pessoa showed in prose and poetry an ontology of our fragmented existence and at the same time he knew the fragility of the individual and the impossibility to make sense of his role in that existence.
In an almost schizophrenic way, he succeeds in getting you to really crawl inside an experience through language and at the same time he allows you to look at it from a distance. Pessoa shows us metaphysics that go beyond the framework of thought and, with all heteronyms, holds up a mirror in which we see something different than our own reflection.
The unruliness and contradiction in his language and the images he evokes in the process, stirs up an enormous necessity to create for me. Again and again.
“The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think.”
Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Anook Cléonne, 2021
Anook Cléonne
Tableau de la troupe
300 x 150 cm
pastel on paper
Anook Cléonne
The announcement
215 x 125 cm
pastel on paper
Anook Cléonne (NL)
Consolation Piece 302
33,1 x 24 cm
14.02.2021
mixed media on paper
rk
Arshile Gorky
The black Monk
1948
oil on canvas
78,6 x 101,5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Arshile Gorky is an American painter of Armenian origin. This painter is affiliated with the abstract expressionist movement. This painting, "The black Monk" is probably his last work. He committed suicide in 1948 and this painting is found on his easel. It is probably inspired by the short story by Chekov of the same name.
What particularly touches me, apart from the strength of the composition, is the feeling of urgency which emerges from it. The 'radicalism' in painting is generally something that interests me and sometimes inspires me. Apart from its intriguing story this painting stays well while getting older. For me this is one of the better pieces of Arshile Gorky.
Henri Wagner, 2021
Henri Wagner (FR)
Untitled
2019
acrylic & coating on wood panel
150 x 100 cm
https://www.instagram.com/henri.wagner_/
rk
Paul Thek
Untitled (humming top painted as a mushroom)
1969
20 x 20 x 20 cm
tin with oil paint
collection Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Paul Thek believed in process, in life and art in flux.
His art is largely about the transposition of symbolic content.
When I was a young artist, in the early 1970s, I acquired his artist book A Document (a document made by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein, Amsterdam / Stockholm 1969). I still cherish it.
Although rarely seen I remained interested in his work.
Thek died in 1988.
It wasn’t until after 1995 that he became widely known through exhibitions and publications and I found more and more out that we (had) shared many themes.
Ben Sleeuwenhoek, 2021
Ben Sleeuwenhoek
Untitled
2014
170 x 230 cm
oil on canvas with mirrors
Ben Sleeuwenhoek (NL/DE)
Bilderbuch
page from a series of scrapbooks
2018
38 x 26 cm
ink and collage
www.instagram.com/bensleeuwenhoek
rk
Joseph Beuys
Ohne Titel
1952
pencil
18,8 x 14,8 cm
signed and dated on reverse
Joseph Beuys
Waking Up Scared in the Night (Man in Grave)
1962
oil, gold paint, light writing paper
21,6 x 14,9 cm
When I was a student at the K.A.S.K. in Ghent, the confrontation with the work of Joseph Beuys was a revelation.
A stroll through Joseph Beuys’ multifaceted oeuvre made me think about his vision of life, his attitude as an artist, his sources of inspiration, art education, art, the art world, sculptures, drawings, etc.
The freedom of his drawings fascinated me: the image and the medium on which he worked. The registrations that he made on a blackboard – during his performances/lectures – inspired me.
To me, diary entries are drawings of my thoughts. They form a breeding ground from which new images can emerge and grow. Like an archivist, they store my ideas. Like an archaeologist, I can go in search of frozen moments: reflections on my life and world events.
Ronny Delrue, 8.2.2021
Ronny Delrue
The Maharjan Caste
2019
fragments of photographs and tikkas
300 x 300 cm
collection S.M.A.K. Ghent
Ronny Delrue (BE)
Sculptures of stones, Monday 11.1.2021, 20:10
2021
mixed media on paper
42 x 29,7 cm
rk
