Paintings 0

Stille nacht, 1999, oik newspaper & photo on canvas, 140 x 130 cm

Silent night

Het verlangen, 1999. oil & photo on canvas, 150 x 110 cm

(sold)

The longing

It’s always a pleasure to play with a contrarian point of view. From right to left, like Japanese do in their manga. Your eye goes from Isabella Rossellini, into the white, the back of the figure with a brown front that looks into a dark half-circle with small windows. When you look further to the left you see green pastures, which contrast with the fuchsia city-scape on the right.

You could argue that the longing is for the green, but because of the contrarian view it might be interpreted as nothing but nostalgia: a longing for something in the past that seems better, but is hardly anything more than a fleeting memory.

As with the preceding two paintings letters recur as if stamped. I was using cut-out paper to stencil them. This way there finally was some concrete shape in the paintings, which I’d struggled with since long before. Later it would evolve in an almost roroco approach, where the meaning of words got lost in the stenciling, metamorphosing into strange patterns. Afterwards I’ve dubbed that phase ‘letters-vermicelli’.

De stad droomt in bloed, 1999, oil & photo on canvas, 140 x 110 cm

(collection Hewlett-Packard)

The city dreams in blood

I was searching for a way to depict the city as I knew it. Not geographically, but emotional. Also to how to show multiple dimensions of actual reality. In the preceding ‘Summer’-collection I was already searching for a solution. Something to fit the several planes of existence and the wholeness of the city within the certain strict fixtures of bottom and top of the canvas.

Again I used cut-outs from fashion-magazines. I had collected a bunch. It was very instructive to read about the then-current femmisphere and women´s surface-care. I had a long fun evening watching a beauty pageant with my then girlfriend – each in our own house, chatting through the telephone. These magazines were better

Thanks to the sisters of my mother’s husband I got an exhibition at Hewlett-Packard in… Amstelveen(?) and they bought the painting. Hopefully it’s still somewhere in the collection.

Iedereen droomt, 1999, oil and photo on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

Everyone Dreams

A period of intense darkness was ending with this painting. I really had to work myself out of a depressing period in which I nevertheless learned an awful amount of interesting things. Both about myself and about the world.

The left arrow points to the right at the silhouette of Spider-Man, but also as in a gesture of ‘moving on’. . Left is also my first attempt at painting realistic, from a photo of Lady Miss Kier, front-woman of Dee-Lite, a very nice band that had a big hit with Groove Is In The Heart. It’s already an old song by then – released in 1990 – and I had the CD ever since, but using her in a painting felt like a new, refreshing start. Somewhat right from the middle I’ve pasted a cut-out picture of a model. Behind her stands the schematically drawn Nieuwe Silo, a place to dance on house and rave. Furthermore you see lots of unpainted canvas, which was a new thing for me to do.

I tried to state something about reality and unreality by juxtaposing the paint and the photo. Was that a critique of my own wandering ways in the preceding years? About all my adventures in psychedelics, weed and drinking? I had a new studio (later that year I would get a new house) and a new girlfriend. I guess it really felt like a new day was born.

Moi (zelfportret met groene zonnebril), 1999, oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm

Moi (self-portrait with green sun glasses)

It had become my custom to paint a self-portrait every so many years. This one was the conclusion to many years of living at the seamy side of life. I had finished Art School and rented a small studio not far away from my house.

In the background we see a burning city, something that should be considered a symbol, not an actual fact. It felt in the years before as if the city was burning, as if I was burning up. That’s probably the reason why the portrait and the background are in such cold colors. I was burning up from the passions, the visions, the craziness from my life, but I had to be cold and strong to withstand it.

The sunglasses were so-called welding-goggles that I’d bought at the local hardware store. When growing up I more or less ignored my surroundings. Going to Art School forced my eyes wide open and made me see too much. The world became this kaleidoscope of light and shape. Considering the painting a symbol of the end of this period it feels like the sun-glasses signify a need to see less so I would be be able to start functioning as a human being, not a registration machine.

De vogel en de man

Het concert, 1998, oil on canvas,

(sold)

Het concert (schets), 1998, oil on canvas, 83 x 50 cm

The concert (sketch)

this was about the first thing I made in the new studio at the Juliana Hospital, a squat in Amsterdam, not very far from where I lived, in west. On the top floor was the studio and living of one of Herman Brood’s assistants, and in another room lived a future girlfriend, I think. Or maybe she wasn’t there yet. I often met her later on with her dog and blua dyed hair.

the woods for this painting have a peculiar measurement because I didn’t but it, but got it off some other artist.

The basis for this depiction was a concert by the Rollins Band on A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise, or Lowlands, probably the 1994 edition. That concert already was inspiration for a tryptic much earlier on at school, but I had to redo it somehow in this new environment.

I rarely sketched something beforehand on the canvas, but this time I did so. It was very nice smooth surface which made everything easier. I used to buy my linen at the Albert Cuyp Market, Which was coarse and a bit lumpy. Now it was different. apparently I outdid myself.

It made for a very fine painting experience. What was intended to be a sketch for a bigger painting turned out to be the basis for more mature and focused brush-works. It really marked a difference in which I approached oil-paint.

Der engel, 1998, oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm

In Korsakoff worked a lady bartender that I was a bit smitten with. She was rude, blonde, had a sharp smile and was a bitch in general. That’s not just me saying, it was also written on her t-shirt: BITCH.

When she danced she occupied the room with gestures and small movements of her pelvis. Nobody dared to interrupt her. In my mind I started to call her Der engel, after the Rammstein song.

In this painting she’s represented by the yellow figure. All the others are representations of different moods and characters within Korsakoff, a bit like with the Disney movie ‘In and Out’

Of course the real ‘engel’ – angel – appears in the five spotlights above the dance floor.

Many years into nightlife (I was loosing interest in Korsakof), she once crossed the empty dance floor running and kissed me on the mouth. That was the closest I ever got to what I wanted from her. It should be enough.

Rammstein, 1998, oil on canvas, 60 x 110 cm

From memory to semi-abstract. The dark and light planes do the dance. they change place in the spotlights. Bodies reduced to surprising conjunctions.

The bellybutton is indeed observed reality, but there’s also a designed hawkish nose from some Aztec god. The tuft of red was real, her bangs. She was tall and slender.

Every time anything Goth came on there were these girls who did a kind of Vogue. Of all of them she seemed do be a force of nature.

I admit working on this after the fact. There was an earlier version that contained only a small part of satisfaction. The original impetus of the beginning, the processing of artistic influences, got a bit lost in this last version.

But I didn’t mention the band yet. The first time I heard Rammstein was in the 1997 David Lynch movie Lost Highway. It left a devastating impression. I later used the intro of ‘Engel’ in a poetry performance for the VPRO-radio. Don’t try to look it up. It’s awful.

Schoenen (naar van Gogh), 1998, oil on canvas

(sold)

Shoes (after Van Gogh)

Anybody who knows his art history recognizes this painting from another artist, Vincent van Gogh. He painted his shoes in his Neunen-period, when he worked mostly in browns and blacks. His famous The Potatoe Eaters (1885) is also from that period.

When I made this I didn’t know much about Van Gogh, except that he was the reason most Dutch didn’t buy paintings. They considered poor artists the only real ones. Oh, and that everyone seemed to adore Van Gogh, but hardly knew other modern artists.

But his shoe-painting was fascinating. He generally moved from one city to the other by walking, sleeping in a ditch when it took too long. Of course that’s an amazing thing, but I have the idea many people traveled like that before the introduction of the common bicycle.

It’s not that I ever walked such distances, but it sure felt like it sometimes. I was also dirt poor as I imagine Van Gogh was. Except that I bought these really neat Nike Sneakers with such a big logo that you hardly notice it’s there.

Painting these in the typical Van Gogh style felt like an ironic comment on my self-chosen path of the peintre maudit in an age of extreme wealth. It’s a pun on myself and a comment on the sanctification of Vincent van Gogh, a man who never had the chance to enjoy the riches his paintings brought in.

Residing at the house of an old schoolmate somewhere in the Netherlands.

IJzeren rijder, 1998, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

Iron Rider

In the nineties I used to go to this alternative dance hole called Korsakoff. At the height of its success it consisted out of three stories. The first floor was covered with checkered linoleum, had a large bar and dance area. Second floor was mostly bar with a Terminator pinball machine. That’s where they played al kinds of heavy rock. On the third they played different dark electronic dance.

During a period of three years I lived quite nearby and hardly had any money. I went there about four times a week, smoked a joint and danced till the end of the evening. for beers I depended on the kindness of strangers.

Sometimes as I arrived on my bicycle I imagined being a knight returning to his town, with all the people on the street chatting, smoking and drinking. Hardly a part of the community since I almost never talked to anyone, I felt nevertheless welcome and wonderful.

Blauwe lippen, 1999, oil on canvas, 50 x 80 cm

Blue lips

In that haze of alcohol and weed the customers of Korsakoff sometimes morphed into a thick paste of brown and black, with the occasional shine of orange hued skin and the shrieking blare of white light from behind the counter. To see a girl there with cap backwards and blue painted lips in a snarl can rouse the painters eye to new heights.

For some strange reason I put her outside, during the day, in the neighborhood of my mother’s house, as can be witnessed by the streetlight in the back. She’s got a tattoo that I’d used on other paintings which originated from the printing classes at our art school.

The primitive sparse style was caused by my suddenly increased interest in the German expressionist style of the 1910’s and 20’s of which Kirchner and Jawlensky mostly caught my eye. It just had to be filtered through my Romantic Amsterdam Alt-Rock-Goth nineties eyes.

At the same time it was a reflection and reaction on the much sunnier and optimistic paintings that preceded them.

Bitches in heat, 1998, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

Korsakoff was far from the only place I went to in the nineties. San Francisco was another. Adjacent to the Red Ligh District it was the late night stand for pimps, hookers, criminals and other derelicts. When everything else in the neighborhood was closed you still could get a nice beer served by a real Amsterdam wench with large cleavage and tiger print leggings.

The place was devoid of inhibition. Every nook and cranny breathed hormones. There were always older women looking for young guys and vice versa. The prostitutes enjoyed themselves like normal people, Finally able to set the standards of conduct for others.

The title Bitches in Heat seems denigrating , but in our hearts we were all bitches in heat, since everything that whole evening in different establishments was about getting laid and in San Francisco it just lost all of its pretense. You knew what you got there, everyone knew what you wanted. It was plain lust for all to see.

Het laatste uur II, 1999, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

The last hour II

Just as with The Tattoo I felt the need to redo the painting in a different color palette. Now it’s more that last hour of the night, when almost everyone has left but you and, well, that dude. The guy who’s going to kick you out.

What is it that makes that we’re sometimes too stubborn to know better? when you’ve consumed so much alcohol that even the fun has stopped being fun but you still think you have fun? What about sober life isn’t so much fun that you decide to hide in a maze of alcoholic thoughts?

They say that you become a bit of stupid with alcohol. Does stupidity make life more bearable? Would we like to be as animals, who don’t have a care because they immediately forget their worries and just act on instinct? It might be a crime of the utmost cruelty to one day make animals conscious of themselves.

Het laatste uur I, 1997, oil on canvas, 110 x 75 cm

(sold)

The Last Hour

It’s that time again: the bar closes, the concert finishes, the light’s turned on. All night you’ve seen everyone in a rosy light that doesn’t show wrinkles. The mind is something of a hallucination machine. With enough stimulation it projects a film of beauty and desire on the faces around you.

Mind you, this always happens, even if you’re not drunk or stoned. All of us project our mind’s reality on the surrounding world. Maybe that’s were the saying “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It originates.

But in real life the light is rarely turned on to show the monsters that a moment ago were still so lovely and mysterious.

The Tattoo 2, 1999, oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm

(sold)

It felt like I wasn’t done with the subject of a beer drinking tattooed man. So I had to paint it again, this time with more attention for other details.

In the time passing from the first version till this one I became interested in a different color pallet. More subtle and refined. The tattoo was reduced to a design I’d made for a course at the art school. The woman in the background had to be of her own world, contrasting her reds with the greens of the foreground. It made her passionate and him more . All his passion was reduced to his beer, that seems to seethe with anger.

The first version harbored a lot of violence, but this one sighs under the inside turmoil, all of which is implied. Thus it became more distanced from the observed reality that informed the esthetics of the first version.

The quite simple story of the contrasting figures was mostly informed by Edvard Munch’s works like The Sick Child (1885-1886) or The Artist and His Model (1921). Here he lets the juxtaposition of the figures do the most work. They don’t interact, but just exist next to each other. It’s the audience that applies story.

It now has a nice home in Savage, Minnesota, USA.

The tattoo 1, 1997, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

In the nineties tattoo´s were mostly for sailors, criminals and certain music lovers. You saw all three of those in dance hole Korsakoff, though I would never have recognized a sailor for real, mind you.

My father had a sailboat, but we never left the cozy fresh waters of the Netherlands. Closest we got to a storm was in the Ketelmeer, a small lake near Urk that can be quite hellish when the wind is wrong. That´s the only time my mother decided it was enough and she left the boat with me and my sister to take the train home.

Tattoo´s still held a certain magic in my eyes and I mostly associated them with the wild nightlife of punkrock music and dope users. The person on the painting does resemble in hairdo and expression someone I often saw in Korsakoff, but this painting was not meant for recognition, just as a symbol. The woman in the back harkens back to another establishment, Patapoe, in which I was a close witness and participant to one of the more colorful scenes of nineties Amsterdam.

Sarajevo, 1994, oil on hardboard, 2 x (38 x 62)

The war in Yugoslavia came as a terrible shock. I’d had visions of darkness and chaos in Europe of the Second World-war. My grandparents would always talk about that time (father’s side was in Indonesia and mother’s side was here in the Netherlands) and my parents and television; a large amount of time and talk was filled with WW2 . It seemed like all of that came back: Europe was at siege again. I stopped watching television and especially the news for at least the first half of the decade.

It didn’t help that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana committed suicide (who’s music had a great impact on me) and that my then-girlfriend Rachida ditched me for an older male-model at school. Ours was quite a tumultuous relationship (my first GF), but when it finished in such a harsh way (the rest of the class knew long before me, I’d even drawn the bastard) it more or less shattered me.

Ziener, 1994, oil-paint on a plasticized wooden panel 42 x 108 cm

Seer

I kept feeling I should update the content of art. The small map in the background indicates the character isn’t a real seer, but a weatherman. For me weathermen represented something magical. Though I quite understood the science behind such things, it seemed like they were revered as if they really could predict the future. At the bottom are flaming non-letters from a invented languafe I would use up until these days. It means nothing, but implicates something is said.

My then current painting teacher said this painting testified to something of a virtuoso. He wasn’t very known for his compliments, so I carried that remark for quite a long while with me (maybe still, I’m not sure).

Houseparty, 1994, oil on canvas, 90 x 30 cm

Dancing, yes, that is one of the greatest joys in life. Not the dance of rules, but dancing as a free person, in free expression, following the beat, following the harmony, or just some click in your head. Finding the space in your body to move your joints in any particular way that gives pleasure. It’s something I gradually discovered in life, but makes me feel more alive than many other things.

Of course a group of dancers in such a free way means disharmony and, as my teacher said with De schaatsers, you should avoid disharmony in a one-paneled artwork. Screw that. right? The brush follows the music, the music dictates the movement. For what is dancing but making love set to music?

it’s a theme that will return often and has found it’s way in how I move the brush, how I apply paint. Many a painting solely exists in that specific shape because of the music I was listening to. Isn’t a Pollock-painting anything more then a dance with paint?

Pacman, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 35 cm

Yes, I got to know art and art-history a bit, and of course I thought it could use some updating. Why always those old-time subjects like models, dirty streets and mandolin-players?

That wasn’t my life, that’s not how my surroundings were. I was a suburban kid on the brink of the digital age. I thought this needed representation in the arts and especially in painting, even if I did paint kind of old-fashioned for those days.

You know what? I did paint old-fashioned, but I had a lot to catch up to, so I started at the beginning, with nice bright colors and glaced surfaces. Why else did I have zinc whit then to cover a black surface so it would look a bit more… painterly?

Note the ‘characters’, though. It was all about love for me, mostly unrequited love in those days. So we have the orange heart on the left, the yellow heart on the right and Pacman hunting us. Love is a battlefield.

De schaatsers, 1994, oil on canvas, 102 x 109 cm

The ice skaters

Being young and discovering the possibilities of the single panel (as opposed to the multiple panel of comics) made me ambitious. I thought I could really add new things. The most important would be of course some typical Dutch culture. Like ice-skating, for example.

The teacher managed as his most important remark that the suggestion of movement as is the case with the right figure was not appreciated in the fine arts. That I did so must’ve been influence from the comics I read. Sequential art is nothing but movement, that’s how a fictional world is created with pictures.

I do get that now. He will always keep falling, which brings continuous disharmony. Something that especially classically trained artists detest. After all, disharmony breaks the spell of perfection.

On the other hand, when you look at works by Pollock or Appel you will constantly see the suggestion of movement. The splatter of paint in motion. More importantly, it’s arrested motion. The movement of the brush is forever engraved on the canvas. A thing that’s been a part of my work since a long time by now – arrested time in motion – but reduced to the painterly brush stroke, not necessarily falling figures.

Side-note: The left character seems to have an avian look to head and arms. I was developing these birdlike humans in printing class (the old fashioned kind of printing, mind you, not ‘printers’ as in computers). I have absolutely no clue anymore what the impetus for that direction was. Maybe a way to deviate from my too pronounced and naive approach to the human face?

Kubie geeft de geest, 75 x 101 cm, oil on sheet, 1994

Kubie gives the ghost

Every hero needs an origin story. Spider-Man got bitten by a radioactive spider, Achilles was born from Peleus and the goddess Thetis and Joan of Arc got visions from archangel Michael.

In a way I’ve always felt like a hero in defying my family’s and society’s norms by pursuing the arts. We didn’t do that. We got a nice and cozy job, went on vacations, to birthdays and payed our taxes on time. We would never be so outrageous to expect to create beauty of any kind.

I do admit feeling affinity with Western heroes like James Bond or Luke Skywalker, but as I’m getting older I sometimes fear my life might be more like a Greek tragedy, with heroes like Perseus or Orestes. Any day now I could poke out my eyes and live in poverty until death, never to be recognized as an artist. I’ve seen it goddamn happen!

This painting was my first on canvas. Well, uhm, a bed sheet. It’s made at school and the end result of many a grueling lesson in something that I could hardly comprehend: art. I wás admitted to the school, that much is true, but I didn’t have any background in the arts, neither did anyone in my family. I was almost a blank slate, like an unpainted canvas.

The only kind of previous art education were European comic strips, American comics, two reproductions on the wall of my family’s house (Dali and Escher) and a large forest-scape in thick paint at my grandparents house.

Oh, I did make two issues of a small comics-magazine when I was twelve or something, with horribly childish drawings and later on I published a magazine called ‘Project. uhmm…’ with a friend, which featured many starting Dutch comics artists and every time a story by me. The art did develop quite well, but I knew I had to learn more, which was the sole reason why I went to Art School in the first place. You can find some of the magazine here: http://www.zinbedcomics.org/

But about art I didn’t know much. That I had to learn on the spot, so I listened to the teachers and talked a lot with my classmates. The one from painting had the habit to point with his foot at our works on the floor and say ‘This part I like’. I collected all those remarks in one painting (not this one) and he liked it!

After that it became easier. I still had no clue about what I did, but at least I’d made some headway. The culmination of that particular odyssey was ‘Kubie geeft de geest’ (mentioning Cubism – of which I had fleeting knowledge and punning on a Dutch saying – giving the ghost is like falling unconscious or dying, in the painting represented as something more literal. Look at the orange figure, an organic form seems to escape it’s head).

It’s painted on a bed sheet stretched over wood I’d split with a breadknife, fastened with decorative nails because I thought that’s how it was done.

The teachers critique on previous work often came down to that it lacked form, so I thought it would be real artsy to make a painting with a lot of square characters. Of course there had to be a certain muscle definition and of course I used the orange character in more works as my stand-in. After all, I was brought up with mostly comics, I still needed a mask for my art.