Vertical landscape 1

In the year 1977 a strong longing for open spaces leaded me to Friesland, a province in the northern part of the Netherlands. Quite another world for a person that grew up in the cosy shell of the small town Maastricht.

It is here in the open space of Friesland that I learn to paint spatiality and transparency by observing the light fall on snow and ice, that is by using complementary colours and painting with fine hatched dashes. While painting I experience how the real landscape dissolves into an endless rhythm of dashes, as in a cosmic trembling.

In these winters of 1978 unto 1982 I can watch mesmerised how sea fog suddenly empties the landscape, and how mist does melt the awareness of limits inside of me. I express the shining and reflecting of light on ice, and at the same time the reflecting of the perceived image in a second, internalised image… the memory of a serene, timeless space in me?

Curiously I did not paint the wide country as a horizontal space (with a deep horizon and high skies) but as a vertical space. Now I look at it as a first timid step to come closer to earth as well as to the experience of her cosmos aspect. At that time all seems to be motionless. Only many years later it starts to flow in my art work…

This article is also published in “Vruchtbare Aarde”, edition 3, 2016, page 32 and 33.