Recuerdos de Tenerife (paintings series of the Canary Islands)

recuerdos de tenerife (own work, 2013, 60 x 80 cm, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, click on the image for an enlargement)

The Canary Islands continue to inspire me. Last February we visited Tenerife, and with a feeling of nostalgia I painted the above. Yes, the title borrows of course from the incomparable guitar piece `Recuerdos de la Alhambra' composed by Francisco Tárrega.

Another motivating factor was my wish to paint the beauty of `simple' foliage. I'm always enthralled by plants, and can look at them for hours and hours. An artist is truly insignificant when it comes to creating beauty, for nature is the true master, I feel.

landscape art 3: what is art for (again)?

as i understand visual art, it is as important to us as music, and dance.

i wrote some posts earlier about dance, dance of life, tree of life...partly because of gauguin's monumental painting, partly because i was inspired by pina bausch. but mostly because i am arriving at the conclusion that many, if not most noteworthy artists in any arts discipline have been tasked with doing what we should all be doing.

so i think we should all be living more music, living more dance, living more poetry and stories and plays and movies, and living more visual art as well...if you get my drift.

sadly however, many of us live in a society where these things are only limitedly tolerated, for whatever reasons. as human beings, we are not even close to realizing our human potential on a global scale, and we are often already bogged down by our immediate social peers.

whereas, to me it seems that life is an inscrutable mystery, in which we play a minor and incomprehensible part with lots of suffering and misery thrown in. in such a setting, any form of art ideally helps us to live our lives more joyfully, more peacefully, more in tune with life and less to the tune of greed, social oppression, military oppression, religious oppression, any oppression.

for many of us, music is an outlet for our emotions vis-a-vis what we encounter in daily life. in my own dutch society, music seems much more accepted in that way than visual art (although, one should count movies in here). yet visual art has so much to offer in the same sense as well. but to appreciate these possibilities would seem to require more exposure to and emphasis on the importance of visual imagery/art in our education system than is the current practice.

$$$$$$$ (money, that's what everybody seems concerned about)

anyway, landscape art is in many ways a counterweight to 'quick bucks'. it takes a long time for a natural landscape to form. when walking in such a landscape, i believe we connect to slow forces of nature, and even the benign-to-humans atmosphere of many trees and plants. (i know there are also less benign landscapes...but these also have a certain time-slowing impact on us).

how to represent in a painting or drawing or drainting or ..., the influence on our feeling and thinking that landscapes have? even more radical, landscapes often set me thinking about the nature of Nature, the nature of of spatiality, the forces of life & death, the nature of beauty,...

i feel quite some understanding for the aboriginal way of looking at the land: also through dreams and ancestral stories from time immemorial. no wonder that i am intrigued by some forms of aboriginal landscape art. why is it that so-called primitive societies seem to have such a much more evolved concept of what life is really about? also see dreamtime on wikipedia.


unknown land (own work, 54 x 60 cm, 2010, click on the image for an enlargement)

landscape art 2: recent paintings of canary islands

the exotic landscape of the canary islands has been quite inspiring to me, even though i do not paint a proliferous number of canvases.

i earlier posted a painting based on la gomera, and i now simply show two recently finished paintings. the first of these is based on a 2003 visit to gran canaria and has been waiting for some finishing touch for years...glad to see i finally found it. however, the colours are difficult to capture with my canon eos 300d...i will upgrade to a better camera this year.


gran canaria i (own work, 70 x 110 cm, 2003-2012, click on the image for an enlargement)



la gomera iii (own work, 80 x 120 cm, 2011, click on the image for an enlargement)

landscape art, van gogh, gorges du tarn

let me say just a few words on landscape art. it has always fascinated me, perhaps firstly because both landscape and art have always fascinated me. but secondly, my views on landscape art were almost demolished when i first saw a van gogh painting (i believe i was around 11 yrs old).

before that, i was already surrounded in our home by paintings of kenyan landscape as a backdrop for kenyan wildlife, by peter pakara (pseudonym of an artist who i barely managed to find on internet as peter siegfried hahn). i admired these paintings greatly.


peter pakara (peter siegfried hahn) (unknown title and date, i believe this to be fair use of the image; the paintings in my parents' possession are all from the seventies)

as a child i already had visited the rijksmuseum a number of times through my primary school in amsterdam. but i don' recall seeing a van gogh there. in short, my idea of what painting was changed completely (i now believe) when i first saw works by van gogh.

unfortunately i don't remember which of his works i actually saw first, but i do recall the sensation of being in complete awe of something another human has made. not like the awe i had before for realistic works of art, but on a wholly new level, the awe that somebody had actually managed to paint something of what i always felt when being in nature.


vincent van gogh wheat field with cypresses (1889, click on the image for an enlargement)

ok, now for my own puny contribution to this post's imagery. three years ago i visited the gorgeous gorges du tarn:


st georges de levejac, gorges du tarn

and some time later i made this drainting:


gorges du tarn (own work, 21 x 30 cm, 2009, click on the image for an enlargement)

(to be continued)

mountain blaze

mountain blaze (own work, 2010, 80 x 200 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

this large painting is hard to photograph, i find, because it is difficult to avoid reflections of light and also because it is difficult to get the colours approximately right. still, the photo should help to explain the sense of adventure that i had while painting it. i did not know where i was going, i just painted very boldly, as if i knew what i was doing...

going from very bold strokes to finer brushes, but maintaining the `firesome' spirit of the mountain, was quite a challenge. like i said in previous posts: it feels like it isn't really me who is painting. i'm just holding the brush.

i really wonder where this landscape journey will take me in future years.

clouds over fallow field

clouds over fallow field (own work, 2000-2010, 39 x 128 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

this painting really took quite some time to finish. i worked on it (off and on) for 10 years. this is partly because i have to get used to a painting, especially when it contains something really new to me which i cannot place but which i feel is worthy of development.

lately, i have found new improvement in this process. it has become easier for me to discern in which direction i want to proceed, and which elements in a painting strengthen this direction and which elements weaken it. also, i find it easier to merge `old' work with new insights, for which i am grateful because i have a lot of `old' work which awaits finishing.

[postscript: i discovered that i already posted this painting, to illustrate an exhibition announcement. but it fits in the series of recent landscapes.]

sea, sky

sea, sky (own work, 2010, 120 x 122 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

i would like to post some fairly recent landscapes, now that i've been freed from the mathematical project `natural topology' (see one-but-previous post). however, i just realized that images will be better findable on the web if i dedicate a post to each image separately.

this is more work, but it also gives opportunity to describe the paintings separately, which should be added benefit. i just have to overcome my usual reluctance to add words to a painting.

the above painting is characteristic of my continuing resolve to paint `as is'. i don't know why a painting works or not, i just know when it does. and i know that by allowing my subconscious intuition free rein, eventually a painting will start to work. even though this may be a laborious and time-consuming process.

i think that i'm in the process of reducing some aspects of landscapes to their essence. this is probably an inevitable development, and i'm looking forward to start a new painting. each time it surprises me how strongly paint can speak, even when reduced to simple forms and strokes.

more digital stuff, mostly mildly photoshopped pictures (don't expect elaborate digital art)

cinema (own work 2008-2010, click on the image for an enlargement)


dark sky, polder (own work 2010, click on the image for an enlargement)


liège 1985 (own work 2008, click on the image for an enlargement)


still life with kiwi (own work 2008-2010, click on the image for an enlargement)

&&&&&&

anyway, one point is: without photoshop i would never have been able to make these pictures. the analog technology necessary for producing anything remotely resembling these pictures is way above my head. i'm not saying they are so great or anything, but photoshop at least has opened a world of photography for me, that was quite closed to me before.

and taking pictures, especially of landscape and nature, is also an inspiring way to prepare visually for painting and drawing.

[to be continued]

some drawings of this year 1

i'm always drawing. but drawing remains an undervalued art form. invariably, for exhibitions, paintings and sculptures are favoured. still, drawing to me is like poetry, and it is definitely a continuous source which pours over to painting. enough said, i'm just going to put up some pictures. (you can click on them for larger images.).

by the way, i invariably find drawings to be difficult to photograph well, my cameras nor my scanner are able to handle the contrasts and subtle whites and tonings that typically occur in a drawing. so although i put in quite some effort, the result is not as accurate as i would like it to be.


la gomera, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 20 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


vision of st. francis, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 20 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


i found my love in a corner, waiting -though we did not know it at the time- for me, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 40 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


here i stand, head in hands, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 30 x 38 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


taking care of the psychiatric patient 1, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 30 x 40 cm, click on the image for an enlargement, i'm not satisfied with this reproduction's colours).


taking care of the psychiatric patient 2, mixed media on paper(own work 2010, 30 x 40 cm, click on the image for an enlargement, i'm not satisfied with this reproduction's colours).


the false guru and his Divine Energy, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 15 x 10 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


self-portrait as you, crying over me, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 30 x 40 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).


self-portrait cruising down the styx, mixed media on paper (own work 2010, 30 x 40 cm, click on the image for an enlargement).

trees, hills

trees, hills (own work, 80 x 110 cm, acrylic and ink on canvas, 2009)

just a new painting, which i'll be showing in an upcoming short exhibition. i also managed to take some pictures of a statuette which i borrowed back from the owner, i think i might put them up also.

see previous two posts: my trijntje-fop-blog is still taking up most of my writing energy, sorry. i managed to revise around 55 of the around 160 trijntje fop poems now, that means i'm going to be tied up quite some time still to come. but i'm strangely satisfied with these light poems, with all their connotations and (hyper)links to the art world and beyond.