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Han Klinkhamer (1950)

The paintings by Han Klinkhamer show landscape in two respects. First, the view of the land opens up, with the painting serving as a window that opens up the view of a horizon, a sky and contours of trees, shrubs or flowers.
At the same time, each painting has a very independent rough structure, the artist has put a lot of work into the texture – it often looks like the magnification of a surface or a cutout from nature. These two perspectives – far away and close – are combined without the focus being affected. Or, in other words, Klinkhamer’s works combine a spiritual image with a material, physical view of real landscapes.
The artist lives in a village directly behind a dike on the Meuse. He only has to climb this dike if he wants to see water, meadows or the moving sky. Nevertheless, one does not feel as if his paintings depict this outer world. Although his works deal with nature, his daily encounter with the elements undoubtedly serves as a framework for him. But the true landscape is created in the studio – “true” here means the landscape created with color, conjured up. Sometimes one gets the impression that plant stems or grains of sand are added to the colour. But the illusion arises from the thickness of the paint layer and scratching with a sharp tool, everything is painted.
Klinkhamer’s works are about the transformation of nature into paintings – and about making this transformation look authentic and credible. As far as the colour spectrum is concerned, Klinkhamer is limited. One almost gets the impression that he is hiding the colors in the motifs. Is this perhaps due to the limited colour diversity of the Dutch river landscape, where Klinkhamer is at home? Hardly. The colours are determined in the studio, in the painter’s head, in the image he wants to create, by the inner truth of the respective image. There is always a primer, often in black or white, and the potential for color, which, however, is reluctant to appear – as if the viewer witnessed the moment of the first rays of sunshine when things take on color. Then we can indeed see a hint of green in the black, and a hint of pink in white.
Do these images radiate a love of nature? Maybe, yes. On the other hand, however, there is also effort and struggle, a pulling and pulling. “With every picture,” says the artist, “you have to start from scratch as if it were the very first image.” Klinkhamer’s paintings thus address not only the outside world, but also the inner landscapes, moods and convictions – without words, and yet as an essential part of the paintings.

www.ftn-books.com has several books on Klinkhamer now available.


 

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Piet Dieleman (1956)

Here is another artist who ia have followed since his exhibition in the early Eighties at the Haags Gemeenetemuseum ( catalogues are available at www.ftn-books.com).

When painting itself is the subject, as is the case with Piet Dieleman (1956, the Netherlands), a radical approach becomes essential. He has chosen to work with strict, self-imposed constraints: six colors in a fixed order. He himself describes them as ‘fantastic tools’ that enable him to find enough disruption to justify the image. It isn’t abstract art as we know it from the modernist tradition, which strove to strike a balance between form and color. This is a more radical, ruthless form of abstraction that is not an end but only a means.

Dieleman studied at the Rotterdam Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands and won the Van Bommel-van Dam prize in 1984. His work has been exhibited frequently in solo and group exhibitions, and is held in numerous important collections, such as Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the Netherlands, M HKA in Belgium and Museo Reina Sofia in Spain.

One of the books on Dieleman published by HEDEN, is a very special artist book. Almost 2 inches thick and only 20 pages. A true artist t book.

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Yves Velter (1967)

Yves Velter lives and works in Ostend, Belgium. An awareness of displacement and alienation constitutes the basis for his work, in which an interest in human (and humane) values comes to the fore. The muted characters in his work are based on existing people who have been made unrecognizable by making them abstract to a certain extent. They are placed in situations in which they create an opening in reality, thus enabling them to break through the impossibility of showing emotions. The images show the contrast between representation and abstraction. It is an aspect that works on several levels: the elusiveness of emotions, sensuality, fears, desires, individuality

n contrast to science, art is a domain where unconventional reasoning remains a possibility. The artist immerses himself in the world of a woman who is caught up in a closed-off logic of writing letters in a code all of her own. He considers these intimate scripts to provide a parallel with the world of the arts, where an artist also creates codes in order to translate his own world of thoughts. In the eyes, the mirrors of the soul, of his figures we can see small pieces of the aforementioned letters. Other objects and materials from several origins that carry a comparable tension within them (red dots, soil from his parents garden, cardboard, clothing) are also being used as ingredients in his works. In a world of his own he investigates and reorders the experiences, objects and metaphors which possess this tension. With connection to this, the artists speaks of making corrections of ratio which enable him to use his very own code of images in order to give expression to the unanswerable.

www.ftn-books.com has the Oostende 1997 catalogue available.

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Joop Vegter (1931-2017)

Born in 1931, Joop Vegter was predominantly inspired by the 1950s. Abstract Expressionism, a form of painting that explored notions of spirituality and the sublime, dominated the 1950s. Many artists focused on the formal properties of painting, and action painting was influenced by the political freedom of the United States, in opposition to the strict nature of the Soviet bloc. New York City became the focus for modernism on an international scale during the Post-War period. Many artists had travelled to the city during the Second World War, fleeing in exile from Europe. This led to a substantial pooling of talent and ideas. Influential Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers and Hans Hoffmann provided inspiration for American artists whilst in New York, and influenced cultural growth in the United States for many later decades. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb were influential artists of this period. The male dominated environment has been subsequently revisited to recognise the contributions of female artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, amongst others.

http://www.ftn-books.com has the signed THE MEZZOTINT book now available.

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Maria van Kesteren (1933-2020)

Maria van Kesteren emerged as one of the first prominent female woodturners in the late 1950s. She makes simple, beautifully proportioned bowl and box forms. Her simple forms and smooth surfaces contrast the material she shapes. The wood is secondary to the forms she creates, which is almost always a circle. She uses the circular form as a starting point and utilises the tension between inner and outer forms. Surfaces are evenly stained or painted so that the detail of the grain becomes secondary to their formal properties and fine definitions of interior and exterior space. She applies similar principles in style to her glass and ceramic objects. Even though her objects appear severe, when carefully examining the subtle curves and transitions one will no doubt be fascinated by the unquestionably tender side of her work.

Maria trained with the woodturner Henk van Trierum in Utrecht in the late fifties and is based in Hilversum, Netherlands. Although most celebrated for her works in wood, she has also designed glass for Royal Leerdam and ceramics for factories including Koninklijke Tichelaar Makkum. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1995. 

Maria’s work is widely collected and can be found in private and museum collections including the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.

www.ftn-books.com has the book OM DE VORM and the special edition of the multiple now available.

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Piet Mondriaan ( continued)

Piet Mondriaan

Because of my 25 year career at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag i have seen many Piet Mondriaan paintings from very close up and always admired the transition from realistic into abstract art by the artist, but last month I encountered a painting by Mondriaan I had never seen before. A painting temporarily on loan to the Singer Museum Laren and it really impressed. A dutch windmill under a bright multi colored sky , showing the first signs of abstract elements on an impressive-sized canvas. Here it is and when it is still there try to visit the museum to see it yourself.

www.ftn-books.com has many books on Piet Mondriaan availanble.

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Anton Mauve (1838-1888)

Anton Mauve

I still have an admiration for the paintings by Anton Mauve, but when we visited the Singer Museum in Laren and saw the painting below

It struck me that many of his paintings were painted with people and animals seen from behind, leaving the scene and emphasizing the dept of the paintings. These are beautiful paintings and belong to the best dutch impressionism has given the world of art.

please look at some more examples and visit www.ftn-books.com for more information and publications on Mauve.

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van Dongen vs Klimt

Same period. On the left van Dongen and his banned painting of a nude female figure and on the right Klimt, both with ornaments and flower patterns. Totally different in their appearance but unmistakenly by their hand. On both painters I have several publications available. Tomorrow another van Dongen painting compared. www.ftn-books.com

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Alfred Kubin (1877-1957)

Alfred Kubin

Austrian draughtsman, illustrator, painter and writer, who was widely known for his illustrations of writers of Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1902 Kubin had his first one-man show at the Galerie Cassirer in Berlin, which was well received by the critics. Besides ink drawings, in 1905 he experimented with a colour paste paint technique he had learnt from Kolo Moser (works like Tsar by the Tombs of his Ancestors (1905; Munich, Lenbachhaus)).

In 1906 Kubin travelled to Paris to visit ageing Redon, and later that year he settled in Zwickledt. He continued illustrating books, such as Die Tatsachen im Falle Waldemar (Berlin, 1908). After 1909 Kubin was a member of the Neue künstlervereinigung münchen and exhibited with its successor the Blaue Reiter in 1911, as well as contributing drawings to Der Blaue Reiter in 1912. Kubin was deeply affected by World War I. Occasionally he treated the war directly in his work, as in The Mortar, but usually he approached it more obliquely. Kubin’s work of the 1930s was generally less savage than earlier but retained a strong suggestive power, as in the dark Meeting in the Forest (c. 1931–2; Munich, Lenbachhaus). There is an archive at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, containing drawings, paintings and other material by Kubin

www.ftn-books.com has several Kubin titles available

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Kees van Dongen ( continued)

Kees van Dongen

Kees van Dongen ….copycat?. This is how i wanted to start this blog because after visiting the van Dongen exhibition in Laren, I really do not know who inspired who. Last month we visited the Van Dongen exhibition in Laren and after the first room it was clear that van Dongen was ” inspired ” by van Gogh and Monet, but in the second room the van Dongen style emerged and later it became clear that all the artist around 1910 must have known each other, Influenced each other and copied each others style and techniques. It was after another 10 years that the van Dongen typical techniques and compositions found their way onto the canvas. Still, there are some questions to be asked , because in the same museum ( Singer Museum Laren) some other paintings can be found by Maks, Sluyters, and the famous van Dongen painting of a lady resting her arm on the table. One can see elements that are all the same in these paintings. just Look at the right arm, the movement in the painting and the use of color. Who is copying who?

for books on these artist please visit www.ftn-books.com