It took me a very long time to finish this painting. For at least 4 times I thought to have it finished. The head has hardly changed, but to give it a ‘good surrounding’ was quite a puzzle. The canvas was much bigger when I first ‘finished’ the painting. I cut it to about one fourth. And then it existed for a long period under the title ‘The Mirror’. It was put on the shelf; I had peace with it for at least two years.

But when I made ‘Black Gloves’ (click on the title to see the painting), it made me rethink this painting. It did not look obvious enough. It did not look ‘secure’ into the world enough.

I put it back in the studio and hoped for a solution. After a month I worked on it again, thought to have brought it to a good end, but it stayed unconvincing.

When I stumbled on ‘Folies Bergère’ and Rembrandt’s ‘Jan Six’ portrait I knew where to go.

The position of the figure I stole from Manet’s painting. It suits the way she looks.

Apart from her pose the painting did not work either, because I had overlooked the way the face is painted. I had tried for too long to finish the rest in a too defined manner. I paid too much attention to it. This happened because when you build up a painting, you normally end with the main subject painted in the most defined way. Here I had to work ‘the other way around’. I had to give ‘the main course a starter afterwards’.

Look at the Jan Six portrait.

The genius in the late Rembrandt paintings is, that the parts of the paintings that should not draw the attention were painted with just a few brush strokes. See the red cape… This is the real virtuosity. 

That’s where I went. Of good help were the longer made brushes (look at the photo on top of the text). For years I have said that paining should be like throwing an elephant through a keyhole from a distance of twenty meters... 

See the detail of a hand.

All attention can be focused on the head.

Sometimes I am happy to have such a long period of painting behind me that gives me this reservoir of 'spare body parts' I can throw on a canvas in three loose brush strokes.

It’s all about balance… I can leave my ’Folies Bergère’ to live in peace, I hope.

click on the image to see the painting on the site.

'What will you drink, dear?'

This is what is left of the painting 'Bull 068'.

More than once I thought to have brought the canvas to a happy ending, but the doubt stayed. Yes, a nice work but not strong enough. And then if necessary all should be ready for sacrifice.

What was wrong?

Each canvas suits a certain subject better than another because of its size and proportions. This canvas is small and slim. I was in trouble.

The bull remained too sweet, did not become ‘bravo’.

Part of the reason could be attributed to the size of the canvas.

For example: I paint portraits if possible at least a little bigger than real. So on a canvas bigger than 35 x 30 cm. It gives the portrait a monumental feel.

Of course with a big bull this becomes an item, but there also lays the challenge.

Till some days ago the work looked like this:

Not good enough…

Staring at it over and over again, more things bothered me. The rest spaces around the bull looked awkward. And there was the doubt full illusion of space turning round together with the bull. Everything shook and rattled in an uncomfortable way.

And then I saw a way to get the job done. Of course by looking at other art...

Long ago I admired the façade of the monastery of Santa Maria in Ripoll. The balance between open space and volume is overwhelming. It is like the silence in music. No beautiful melody without the right balance between silence and noise.

I think to have found the clue for fixing the painting there.

Of help can be, that I am working with long brushes. It gives a better overview while painting.

Normally I have my palette far from my canvas. I put the brush strokes on as if blind, because I am near. Now I keep the overview even when I paint.  

I’ll see what the future brings. While writing the blog, the work has advanced:

It looks a lot better already.

A neighboring thought:

In an old catalogue I refused to write the measures next to the images. This to satisfy the curiosity of what others might imagine the sizes of the works would be in real. Some works in print or on screen look smaller, some bigger.

This fascinates me. I stumbled on this while reading an interview with Willem de Kooning and having seen his great work ‘Excavation’ in London. In real it is much smaller than I had imagined for years…

The video shows work of Willem de Kooning. My apologies for the quality and the music, but I could not find a better one on the net. 

For a period Frank Auerbach was one of my ‘heroes’. In Florence I used to make sketches at a ballet school twice a week. The teacher introduced me to his work.

Auerbach was a friend of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. His work is not as ‘juicy’ as theirs.

Kitaj (the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam owns one of his canvasses) and Kossoff are two other painters belonging to the ‘London school’.

Francis Bacon portrayed Frank and Lucien.

Double Portrait of Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach, 1964

I read the biography by Robert Hughes on Auerbach. I experimented painting in thick layers.

Frank 'guided' me for about 6 years.

What were the things I appreciated about him?

He paints 364 days of the year. That is what I call dedication!

While writing this blog I listen to Gregorian chants not only because he is a 'hermit'.

In his research I see similarities with that music. There is a similar simple and essential approach to the arts.

He paints images over and over and over, scraping paint off and putting new layers upon layers. Many times he paints the same model.

There is the story about the Japanese master who studied to paint a rooster in one fluid line for months. When the client was insulted that the master asked a big fee for 'his' rooster painted in less than one minute, the master adviced him to come to his village. There was no wall in his village left blank. All were covered with his attempts for the absolute cock.

In Auerbachs work you see all the attempts one over the other till the final three brush strokes that define the image.

This stubborn banging your head against the same wall over and over till the final solution is found, is for me a valid way of coming to a good result. It coincides with the thought that one should not sit and wait for inspiration. Good paintings happen because of blood, sweat and tears. 

Still, he guided me for not more than 6 years…

There are two things that made him move more to the background.

Eating oysters all year round becomes boring as much as French fries every day. And that is what I feel when looking at his work.

I saw the solo show at the Tate Britain (click on the word 'Tate' to open the information about the show) and after two rooms I had enough. It is true; a painter can 'claim eternal fame’ after having produced three great works, but those three I have seen many, many times. There are these same damned brush strokes in all his works…

(The painting at the top of the blog is one of those three masterpieces).

The lack of depth in his work is another downer. Critics of Rembrandt said that he could not paint depth and that is why he painted thick.

One work of Auerbach is really painted like that. It is almost a sculpture piece. I saw it in the Tate Britain, but forgot to make a photo for this blog, sorry… This one might give an idea. The paint suply shop must hang the flags out when he arrives...

In the same period that he was a major inspiration, I experimented with adding other items (for depth). Only twice I was convinced. The work ‘Venus in the reed’ is a happy result. That's a way to create space! (I found a pretty girl in the hey stack!)

Venus in the reed

Of course I also looked at Anselm Kiefer:

What has remained…

Quite often I still paint layer over layer, scraping off, letting the surprise catch me. But I try to get rid of the dull 'Auerbachian' brush stroke.

I always look at paintings from close by to see how they are built up. I have never given it much thought that many others don’t, believing everybody automatically does it.

Maybe people don’t look from close by out of some false respect or out of fear that the painting might attack?

Read my texts about if art can kill nº 1 and 2. (Click on the numbers to go to the texts). No worries!

Since years I have broadened the way of how to put paint on a canvas. A charm of a painting can be that seen from nearby the image shatters into chaos.

I have written about this more than once.

Some days ago I looked at 'Mist over Sea’ and decided to put it under your attention again.

I relate very much to these four quotes by Francis Bacon:

In my case all painting... is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve. 

I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance. 

I believe in deeply ordered chaos.

It makes painting an adventure. Behind every tree there can be a bear or a beautiful girl…

Here you see some close ups of the 'Mist over sea'.

To see the whole painting, click on 'Mist over Sea'.

Back to work! Frank has been painting for hours!

The video shows works of Frank Auerbach. They should have been accompanied by Gregorian chant… 

This weekend I have added more sketches to my chapter of the sketchbooks (< Click on the word and in a new window you go to that page; in total there are now 200).

I have a series of over 70 sketchbooks dating back to 1980. Subjects: they can be about anything. Some are sort of a dairy, others are ideas for paintings, others are just non sense and there are sketches made after works of great painters. Of these last ones you see a detail of a sketch after a self-portrait of Rembrandt. Could it be anybody else?

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Underneath you see a collection of portrait copies of paintings I like. There are two fake ones amongst them, made not of paintings. They are portraits of two favorite artists in other diciplines. You can find out who’s who?

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These sketches help a lot.

Some time ago I wrote a blog about my problems with the word ‘creativity’.

We give too much importance to having to be creative (instead of just having it happen). It is fashion, even though the idea dates back to the 20's of the last century. 

I choose for learning from the giants who came before me; give what they made a twist, over having to figure out everything by myself and in an all too personal language. 

Art is communication. It comes in handy to learn from the great ones, copy the others, discover the beauty of what they made. And it helps to learn new letters. Instead of staying stuck with the ‘I’, the ‘m’ and e’, you learn the ‘t’ and ‘h’ from them and the ‘w’ from we. I am a too social animal to run in a blind alley.

This is not a new view on how the arts work. H. W. Janson starts his art history bible by talking about a Roman sculpture group being used by Manet for his ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. It also exists as a sketch of Marcantonio Raimondi after Raffeallo Sanzio. And then Picasso copied faces from Manet's 'Déjeuner'. This string of 'copies' gives a deeper meaning to the works.

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Why do I talk about these matters again? 

I love the self-portrait of Rembrandt of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It has been far to long since I’ve seen it. I want to go and talk to Rembrandt soon! If not in Vienna, then in my sketchbooks!

Maybe that is why my copy looks so worried?

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P.S.:

Another important thing in the sketch is its size. People may think that painting big is more difficult than painting small. But if you make the smallest mistake in a small sketch, it shows big, if you blow up the image. To give an idea of how big the sketch is, see my hand laying over it.

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The video is the famous scene of 'Amadeus', where Mozart plays a theme composed by Salieri and then gives it a far better twist.

Last week I found an article in the NCR/Handelsblad (Dutch newspaper) about a show I had in Vienna in 1997…

Nice memories.

Tony’s gallery was the most beautiful gallery ever to show my work. Too bad it closed, too bad for me, too bad for Vienna. She was very active.

The show was called ‘LOST INNOCENCE’.

Subject: 'FALLEN ANGELS'.

I started to paint ‘Fallen Angels’ after my stay in New York. I lived on the 14^th floor (in the East Village) looking out over Alphabet City. In those days that was a rough area. I saw the many windows lit after dawn. It made me think of those windows like a series of sarcophagus with people in them, looking for a short cut to paradise on earth through hard drugs.

We all want to manipulate our fate, find the shortest route to paradise. With hard drugs it works for a while and then we fall.

Hence the `Fallen Angels’…

It resulted in a series of ‘Fallen Angels’ framed in caskets. Caskets similar to the ones in which one keeps butterflies.

I have made 39 of these 'Fallen Angels' exposed as stacked on walls.

gallery Langenberg, Amsterdam

Gallery Turm 32, Hamburg.

Gallery Cachet, Vienna. During the opening I painted a canvas of about 300 x 300 cm in 12 minutes accompanied by aria's of the opera Carmen.

Gallery Brenda Taylor, New York.

I showed them in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Koblenz, Vienna and last but not least, I brought the ‘Fallen Angels’ back to New York (see images above).

And then heaven dried up. No more angels fell to earth after 2008. My interest had moved to bulls and bullfights. You may think it to be a very different subject matter, but if you check out my thoughts about this ritual, you will see not much has changed. Subject is still life, death and humanity trying to be God.

For a longer text about the 'Fallen Angels', click on the word.

Voor de Nederlands lezers, ga naar 'back to writings' en dan naar dezelfde titel onder 'Dutch Writings'.

This week I have looked at the chapter TECHNIQUES.

(Click on the word 'TECHNIQUES'and the chapter will open in a new frame)

In many blogs I wrote about what for me is essential in painting. In the chapter TECHNIQUES you can find the heart of my thoughts about the how and why on the opening page. The following chapters talk about the different techniques I use.

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One thing I want to pay attention to in this blog (also to be read on the first page of TECHNIQUES) is progress.

We often think things evolve in a linear way. I am currently reading ‘The man without qualities’ of Robert Musil (1933) and by replacing ‘Kakania’ for the European Union; I find a lot of parallels with what is happening and how we deal with it. History repeats itself.

I am more for evolving in a spiral way. We don’t go back and forth, we move on and pass by similar situations in the world and us in different time periods. The famous phrase: ‘what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9), appeals very much to me. 

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The same I find for the arts. The idea that art has moved from figurative to abstract, with abstraction as the end of the line, seems quite ridiculous. What about the Alhambra? We are captured in convictions of the time we live in and see everything through colored glasses.

In 1989 Arthur C. Danto (Narratives of the End of Art: ... But once art makers are freed from the task of finding the essence of art, which had been thrust upon art at the inception of Modernism, they too have been liberated from history, and have entered the era of freedom. Art does not stop with the end of art history. What happens only is that one set of imperatives has been lifted from its practice as it enters what I think of as its posthistorical phase...) wrote that we live in the posthistorical phase and I agree.

The big step forward is that we can now see that all is done, we can see the spiral; we see that no new territories need to be concurred. There are no walls to be broken down, no prejudices to be fought.

This gives enormous freedom. And I take this freedom to paint in as many different styles I want, according to what I want to achieve with the work I am making.

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The sketches that illustrate this blog are from the sketchbooks page. They are here to make the blog a bit less heavy (as well as the video)... 

(Click on the word 'sketchbooks' and that page opens in a new frame)

The video is Monty Pythons 'It's the arts'.

How to react to all that is happening in the world right now… Nowhere I see painters react in a valuable way to the latest events. And nobody asks the question why painters do not react, at least, nobody in my surroundings. Everybody is happy and on vacation…

Me too, it seems I just continue on the way I have been working.

Did my heroes react in their days? The first one I think of is Goya, his last series of paintings and the series of the disasters of war. There is the 'Guernica' of Picasso... I admire Max Beckmann very much and love this painting.

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And there are the etchings of Otto Dix.

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Another hero of mine reacted in a different way to the events. Rembrandt’s late series of self-portraits show a man who has compassion and has surrendered and accepted his fate.

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The ‘human condition’… That is what I am after, if I am after something. I think of Francis Bacon… For years I painted canvases with exclusively that sort of subject.

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'Spit and rain', 1989.

I try to integrate (give it a place) the madness that is present in all of us in my works (not always). Why do people kill without any remorse? I think to have seen, that that emotion is not even very far away in myself either. Not something to be proud of…

And there is the indifference…

And our love to give the violence a name foreign to us. It’s the ones that have other aims than we have. We are ok...

I divide my time between works in the ‘old’ style (now mostly bulls) and the flower paintings.

Paintings can also give relief.

I do worry. This worry with what I read in the papers is quite abstract. We are used to seeing so much misery.

But around me not all is pink and happy either. A dear friend of mine is in a very bad place and I cannot stop thinking about it. It is very present in my everyday thoughts. What do I do with that?

There is the story of Picasso painting the Guernica with Dora Maar and Maria Teresa Walter fighting over him in the studio and him using that as an inspitration for the painting...

Where do I stand? I should not lie. What can I do with all this? How will it come out, if it will come out? I feel very sad.

The video can be quite shocking.

We are children of our time. Every generation lives according to it’s own dogmas.

I grew up in a period where in the arts ‘creativity’ was a key word. We had to let our souls free, become a ‘Homo Ludens’, a playing human being.

In the nineteen-thirties Johan Huizinga in the Netherlands introduced the term. It became a big item thirty years later. ‘Provo’ and the ‘Kabouters’ were two movements to be part of in order to show our parents, that we wanted to shake things up and ‘put different glasses on in order to see clearer’.

I was, as you may say, victim of all of this in my youth. I have had many teachers telling me I had to let loose and break free. ‘Be creative! Away with tradition! Away with education! We decide for ourselves what is good for us!'

(Quite some of them went for this way of teaching, because they could not produce a decent drawing. Better play the ‘innocent child’. As if children are innocent and only education turns them in monsters. And what can you build on these paintings as a follow up).

I admit that it is good to throw a brick through the windows of the palace of arts (and please have a good look inside) in order to shake things up every once in a while, as long as it is done with humor.

I still have fun looking at the photos of the ‘Insekten sekte’ en the ‘Deskundologen’.

But once everybody is awake again, it is time to go back to what art really is about. That is not something like having a peanut butter floor in a museum created by one of the most overrated Dutch artists: Wim T. Schippers. I have seen to many of these objects in museums. They do not wake me up or make me feel shocked anymore. I just run to the next room. Seen it and done it so many, many times...

I am gifted with the talent of being a pain.

If people say black, I say white. If people say break loose, I say tradition. So I did not really brake free, I also wanted to study the old masters. I was and still am convinced that you can only break free in a profound way if you know what your chains are. And why not do something with those chains.

I had to think of this, seeing the show ‘New Babylon’ in the Haags Gemeente Museum with my daughter. ‘New Babylon’ is the creation of Constant Nieuwenhuijs. He designed the new city for the 'Homo Ludens'.

Did Constant have a solid education, needed for breaking free in the profound way? I don’t know.

But what I know is that Gala loved the show. She chose the building in which she wants to live and that is a plus. Going to a museum with my child and seeing her happy makes me happy too. New Babylon is great, dispite all the sixties blabla I dislike so much.

Should I adjust my convictions? Or just give space for others to belief their own dogmas? Of course mine too are no guarantee to create good art and I should not force others to go my way…

In the end one just fights paper tigers. Art neither obeys nor follows rules. Sometimes I get a bit tired of myself. The only thing that I am totally sure of is that one has to stay curious. Maybe the 'Deskundologen' can help me out.

video: Cor Jaring, a Dutch photographer who documented the wild sixties and seventies.

(Art talks about art. There is always the reaction on what was before. The idea that a piece of art can stand on its own is ridiculous. Only the absolute painting can be like that and that painting will never be made).

I was painting a nude in the style of ‘THE MIRROR’, ‘THE RAPE OF EUROPE’, ‘THE SKY SCRATCHED OPEN’, ‘SPAGNOLITA’ and ‘SHHH’.

I was well underway, but the head would not show up (see image of blog before this one).

I had the desire to make a painting in the ‘rough style’, but then with a positive and sweet expression. A sexy young woman!

I have made ‘heads’ of women in the 'rough style' (here are the heads), but never with a really sweet expression, a real contradiction.

What is the 'sweetest girl' in art history? A good contestant is ‘GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING’ of Vermeer. Painted in a very smooth way, the opposite of what I was looking for.

One cannot compete with a painting like that, but as a don Quijote one should only challenge the best. It is no use going after small talents. This was what came out as a sweet expression… She looks a bit more inviting, I'd say.

Title: 'GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, of course... and off course I changed it, you don't fool aroiund with Vermeer!  

I don't pretend to know better, I only want to challenge myself beyond my capacities and come up with what can be a surprise mainly to me. 

It might come in handy.

Soon I have to portray a woman. The complication is almost always that women do not like to be portrayed in a ‘rough’ way. No hint in the direction of wrinkles, no heavy shading, no sculptured images. And that is what I like so much!

To do some ‘research’ I have decided to give myself a series of sexy women painted in black and white, going loose.

What struck me in most pictures that I downloaded, is the frontal lighting. All is slick. So little to hang on…

The video? George Michael: 'Freedom' of course!

Back from Italy and inspired by Marino Marini, I started to paint in the old fashioned way. Finding the right balance between rough and exact. Leaving space for interpretation. Half way through the painting (a nude seen from the back) I got stuck.

I had had big plans; one night I dreamed the title for the ‘absolute painting’: ‘With time all dead flow into one’.

This was a new sensation, to have the title even before having started the painting. After ample reflection and having tried to make some sketches, I came to the conclusion that I will only be able to paint it, when I have become senile and reached the end of my life.

Never ever paint the absolute painting in the strength of life! What to do afterwards?

In the past I would have forced my way ahead. Now, thanks to the fact that I can work in different ways, I hopped over to the other way of painting.

I started a new 'flower' canvas, this time an iris.

image of iris on the easel and next to it the half finished nude seen from the back

Why do I make these flower paintings?

I am passionate about shiny bright colours. A subject that I have painted for years is butterflies. Butterflies as the series of 'Fallen Angels', I started after my New York days, later as the flying pieces of bright colour in for example 'Butterfly man'. I even confess to own a mounted butterfly...

From butterflies to flowers is a small step. Strong colours as seduction! 

One inspiration that made me go in the flower direction I have talked about in my blog of 02-02-2015: Monet’s water lilies.

There were the flower-still-lives of Manet too.

What really did the trick was a show of the watercolours of flowers by Emil Nolde seen in the early 90's. These images stayed in my head for years and years. The intensity of the colours overwhelmed me. 

a collage of flower paintings by: Monet, Manet, Nolde and me (who is who?).

But my interest in colours that light up actually goes further back than the show of Emil Nolde.

It started with a ruby… I saw the painting  ‘Ritratto di giovane donna con liocorno’ by Raffaello Sanzio in the Galleria Borghese in Rome long, long ago.

How was it possible that the ruby gives light???

For years I was puzzled, also because the solution did not fit in my way of working as I found out.

To get a result like that one has to paint a series of transparent layers of colours over the white underground, preferably the original underground. And my usual way of working consisted and often still consists of painting layer after layer of thick colours, trying to surprise myself. Not by carefully calculating!

Art might be the only occupation in which inconsequent behaviour can pay off. In 2011 I started to paint flowers in the ‘new’ technique first in gouache, carefully calculating where to have the white of the paper playing the role under a thin layer of transparent paint. I showed the first results in the show in Laren.

Works in oil paint followed. First 'new' colour to present itself as a breakthough I had had for years, but never used: ‘old Holland red gold lake’. Someone gave me that tube and only with the ruby it got under my attention again. That colour transparent over white glows like hell!

My palet for the 'flower' works has become totally different from the paintings in the ‘old’ way. Here colours like ‘doixine mauve’, ‘manganese violet reddish’, ‘cobalt violet dark’ and the mad ‘old holland yellow green’ play a prominent role. It is fun; often they react different from expected.

And here we are, it is almost summer… Flower 030 is finished (click on the name and the painting appears in a new window). For the moment I cannot produce brighter colours...

The video shows the late Herman Emmink, singing 'Tulips from Amsterdam'...