My drawing is still for sale on the site of Anonyme Zeichner*innen. It is to be found in the Archive and can be bought on line for € 250,-

Notes on an artist and his world
My drawing is still for sale on the site of Anonyme Zeichner*innen. It is to be found in the Archive and can be bought on line for € 250,-
Today I added a Malieveld Invites page to the projects-menu of my site. I started a new series of portraits of people who stand out to me on the walks to the Malieveld, a large public space in Den Haag. I describe them in text on the Malieveld in an e-mail that I send myself. Later I make a painting of them in oilpaint on stone paper. I started the first portrait in 2023 and after apause I restarted the series recently.
This exhibition changed venue to the Kunsthaus in Erfurt after a succesful edition in Berlin last fall. My Shard – , drawing is still in it untill March 28 and it is still for sale for € 250,- also on-line. After Erfurt the exhibition will move to Hamburg where it will be shown from May 16th untill June 5 in in Hypercultural Passengers.
The yearly benefit auction for De Aanschouw, Rotterdams smallest art gallery, was held March 2 in studio building Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam. I offered one of my shard-drawings to be sold, archeology of my past. A reasonable price was offered after a long rally in which the auctioneer, Rotterdam Artist Inge Aanstoot, did her very best to raise the biddings. The benefit was a succes: the art that was offered and sales were very satisfying.
You can find an account of the auction here!
Same but Different – Equinox to Equinox is a short duration performance festival taking place on Sunday 22 September from 13:00 to 14:00 at the Hof in Dordrecht. Everyone is welcome to participate in openness and solidarity, embracing diversity and acknowledging each other’s individual circumstances, difficulties and conflicts. There is no fixed programme with consecutive performances but everything takes place simultaneously, collaborations can arise spontaneously. Participants so far: Marita Bullmann, Engel, August S. Geerlings, Ienke Kastelein, Frans van Lent, Christiane Obermayer, Kees Koomen, Jolanda Jansen, Nico Parlevliet, Yvo van der Vat, Yelena Myshko, Annie Abrahams, Yvette Teeuwen, ieke Trinks, Willum Geerts, Topp & Dubio. Same but Different – Equinox to Equinox is an international event for public action for freedom for all people. It takes place at about the same time in numerous locations worldwide. Every year on the Equinox (in March and September), the duration of day and night is roughly equal around the world. In the spirit of cosmic equality, the event is a global connection for people performing together in public space. This sharing of time and space brings us closer together, as a temporary (global) community to encourage, through performance art, non-violent expressions for locally specific conditions. |
I will participate with a performance called Tracing the Muse
I presented four portraits from my series New Encounters in the EX-MÊKH exhibition ¿De Donde?. They represent people I notice on weekly walks to the Malieveld in Den Haag. I write a description in my telephone and mail it home. Then, in my studio, I paint the portraits in oilpaint on stone paper. I also write words from the texts in the painting. It is a hommage to Francisco Goya whose drawings and comments I admire greatly.
In the Petit Palace Hotel I presented two portraits on a background of text, written on the wall with one wollen thread and two portraits without backgrounds. Also, above the bed in the room I wrote a text with one red woolen thread: Her spine moved like a snake . The wall was almost black there with blue in it which contrasted beautifully with the red of the text. Maarten Schepers placed sculpture on the bed underneath which in one blink could have been paws of animals, maybe pre-historic, which would have suggested fossiles. On the other hand the work could also have been seen as flowers on a grave or a monument. This would have turned the bed into a place of memory. The contrast with my text, which to me has an erotic connotation, placed above the bed as it was, opened a lot of associations to me. It enables me to eleborate on this way of working.
EX-MÊKH is preparing for the Hybrid Art Fair and experimenting with their materials. Here some try-outs by Kees Koomen who is looking for a interesting way to present his series of New Encounters The work is intended as an homage to the sketches Goya made in the streets of Madrid and elsewhere. Those drawings and etchings were my favourite artworks in art-school:
Friday September 29 was the day RUW #6 was presented to the public. It happened during Hoogtij, the two-monthly open platforms evening in Den Haag. For the occasion HOK gallery was available and the editor decided that a large drawing was to be made by all participants in this edition of RUW. This drawing was going to be auctioned on sunday.
The presentation was a succes, many visitors came by to see the new RUW Magazine and not many magazines were left in the end. You can find an account of the opening here!
Then sunday the auction of the large drawing took place. It did not draw a lot of attention but those who came were a motivated public. After some useless attempts of the auctioneer Geert Schriever to sell the drawing as a whole details of the drawing were offered for which two ladies showed the formats with wooden angles. This worked better and the afternoon ended with a positive amount of money on the account and everybody enjoying a glass of wine.
Equinox was a succes with more then twenty performers on the Hof in Dordrecht. There were moments that the atmosphere was beautiful in slow movements with colour and sound.
My own performance existed of soundbytes that I spread out over the square by speaking them out to people, by writing them on little scraps of paper and hiding them on the square and by listening for sounds of the past on different places of the historic square. The soundbytes were pieces of conversation or cries that I noted during my project Walks to the Malieveld. You can find an account of the afternoon here! And a video by Steef van Lent can be found here!
I did also make two sketches of performers which you can see here:
In spring I started the project page on this website on which I show the source of a lot of my work. It shows the sketches I make next to my texts in my diaries. Lots of them are the inspiration for new paintings, installations or performances. I recently published sketches from my trip to the US and Mexico in 1984 which proved a change of focus from the USA and western culture to the more European background I grew up in. I realised that I admired the Spanish colonial heritage in Mexico and California and that I never traveled to Spain. My interest in Spanish culture and Mediterranean culture in general began to grow. Ezra Pound’s translation of French troubadour poetry and Spanish Renaissance poetry was also an inspiration.