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My main interest lies with landscape painting. I try to carefully observe, record and construct nature’s beauty and peculiarities. Notwithstanding the subject matter my inspiration is broader than landscape painting, I have the most reverence for the tradition of classical art that places beauty on the forefront. Giving up beauty as a force, standard and ideal is a deformation and a narrowing of consciousness as it seeks to relegate the work of art to the level of mere allegory in exactly the same way as the truth of the myth is destroyed by allegoresis. The truth of art, as the truth of myth, has its own language and with art this is the language of beauty.
Why an interest in (traditional) painting? Our age is dominated by digital media and disposable cheap prints. We see pictures everywhere, all the time. In a way painting tries to counteract this status quo. When we make a painting we build up a piece that can never be really copied, it has a certain physical uniqueness. A painting has a recalcitrant quality to it, it refutes the evanescence of most other pictures by physically being there through time. Its physical being there is not trivial, it is essential and makes it a thing of the world, and, vice versa, the world gives us a glimpse of itself through this object. This is why my paintings have texture, the brushstrokes are visible, you can see and even feel the paint that is applied to the canvas. They look rough and paint-like from up-close yet form a coherent image from a regular viewing distance. This in contradistinction with digital media that does not even exist as such; also prints, magazines, etc. are flat, they lack the physical texture of paint, they are copyable. This recalcitrant quality is further enhanced by the materials used, my paintings – in line with traditional paintings – are done with highest quality oil paints that will never fade, they are painted upon oil primed linens that will withstand centuries of bad conditions; and even if the canvas-support is gone, the paint-layer will remain and can be relined. Paintings have a robustness.
My work finds its origin both in the studio as well as outside (en plein air). My style could be defined as a form of (contemporary) impressionism. In concreto, I have been influenced by two distinct, but related, movements in the history of landscape painting. One close to home, one further away. With regard to the former I refer to the pre-impressionist painters of l’École de Barbizon, especially Charles-Francois Daubigny. With regard to the latter I refer to those painters that were active around the northeast of the United States about a century or so ago (Willard Metcalf, et. al.). I feel that they carried on a certain project that originated in Europe, but only came to full fruition there. In any other age familiarity with a tradition so remote from your home would have been quasi impossible, but thanks to the modern digital media such familiarity, while still lacking of course as addressed above, is at least not impossible anymore.
Even before turning to painting I have always had an interest in aesthetics (the philosophical study of beauty and taste). Most influential to me has been Plato’s highly ambivalent position towards art. The platonic criticism of mimesis (i.e. representational art) is widely known, he speaks ill of the poets and painters for they merely imitate. On the other hand, in one of his harder to understand dialogues, which is really a mythical tale, the Timaeus, he speaks of artistic creation in the most lofty of words: the demiurge creates the cosmos by bringing form into matter. As creator the demiurge is the skillful artist creating the most beautiful and orderly whole out of mere matter. Artistic creation is always embodied with this ambivalence, the artist is located in a between from where he tries to go beyond imitation and enter or come near the realm of the divine, which, as Plato points out, is only possible with the aid of great technical skill (technê).