Oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm
Tag Archive: art
Photography
Photography, Alu-Dibond, 60 x 40
Photography
Bethany was one of my fellow students at the artschool in Utrecht, the HKU (in the Netherlands). Bethany was and is extremely talented. She can do everything.
Draw, paint, etc. In our last year at the academy, she started with her “pinhole” photography. She made really small boxes with mirrors inside. And she made her own pinhole cameras, which she put inside her selfmade worlds. These cameras where covered with mirrors also, otherwise you could recognize them as cameras. They would become a part of the picture, so she had to disguise them.
With this technique, it looks like we are watching large en high rooms, as if we are in some kind of cathedral. We are part of the picture.
Nowadays her pinhole pictures are far more complicated. And Bethany also makes beautiful short animations, like “Red-End”.
Check her website: http://www.pinhole.nl/pages/intro.php
AND
Check this teaser of one of her animations:
Oilpainting, 160 x 80 cm
Edvard Munch is also one of my NO heroes 😉
I always look at his backgrounds. For me, as a painter, to make an interesting background is not easy to do. Also to make it match with the motives you are putting in. Which technique does the artist use, to accomplish that?
In the first painting – the sick child, made in 1885- I especially admire the way Munch painted the cushion. The red colour of the hair of the girl, is sort of shining in the pillow.
In the second one, “Parish nude”, made in 1896, the painting looks more simple. He also puts a contour around a part of the woman. The brushstrokes are less visible. He is thinking more in “colour fields”. It makes the painting more “flat”. He even doesn’t bother, to give the woman a real face. I think, because it’s now more a matter of art and what you can do with paint, how you can solve problems you encounter as an artist. Then it is to paint a real figurative painting. And don’t forget, in these days artists had to compete with photography.
So they had to invent new ways, of how to cope with their art. What do I want with my paintings?
Is it just a coincidence, that Munch is also a painter from Scandinavia? Like Per Kirkeby? I really don’t know.
Chalk on paper, 32 x 25 cm
Well, I don’t believe in heroes. However, Per is getting close. We both work with the same themes. And we both are real “painters’.
During my study at the academy in Utrecht (HKU) I saw a marvellous exhibition in Amsterdam. And a few years later in Denmark, in the Louisiana Museum. Per really knocked me of my feet. Can you cry, just by watching a few paintings? Yes, you can (Obama will agree on this).
My teachers told me, that Kirkeby is a “difficult painter, really a painter for painters”. I don’t know if they are right or wrong. I don’t know how it is “Not to be a painter”.
This is a mix of a drawing I made and a picture.
65 x 50 cm
René Heeres artist 