I wanted to make a painting, minding my own business, but then the world started to collapse. Gaza. Ukraine. Climate changes. How should I react. What can I do. 30 years ago I became father for the first time. My kid is a father now himself. Life repeats. All I can do is paint. Staring into nothing. Painting for peace.
This painting is now on show at Kunstliefde and of course it’s raising questions. Same for the other ones exposed. Let me explain briefly before going deeper into it.
Spoiler alert: it is what it is. A small white painting. For those who find that sufficient, read no further.
POV 1: this painting represents how I feel. In fact a very romantic almost ancient way of expression. It’s not that expression always be like overwhelming gestures. I’m feeling empty, confused, powerless. With a need for contemplation, philosophical gestures about time and space. It’s also a start. Current stage of being.
POV 2: I wanted to make a white painting. Just like that. Nothing more, nothing less. The gestures of minimalism. Conceptual art. Take a canvas, take a can of white paint and merge together in a non personal way. Just paint and just paint. Verb versus noun. Verb and noun.
POV 3: Then it got a title. First title was ‘white painting’. In line with my earlier work I could have chosen ‘white painted canvas’ – as a young artist I painted a ‘red painted canvas’ and a series ‘black is a color, tribute to Matisse’, later on there’s the series of ‘not painted canvas’ or ‘depainted’. So it’s a formal approach. It is what it is. Nothing more nothing less. A white painted canvas.
The other day I came across an article that mentioned light traveling through space. Light from the sun, one big energy explosion, travels 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach the earth and makes it possible for us to live and see. Focused on the white canvas we are actually looking into the past. What we see is energy that left the sun eight minutes ago in the form of light. In my head it just connected. Now we have a title! Although not descriptive but as an entity of its own.
Title separated from the artwork and yet together, coexisting for ever.
POV 4: There’s also a sub title: Painting for Peace. That relates to my other works in this exposition that literarely question the use of painting. Like I wrote in the artist statement: I wanted to make a painting and then the world started to collapse. It was October 2023. I had already been unpleasantly affected by the Ukrain war but now it started to fully blow away world peace at a large scale. It touched me. What was I doing. Making paintings, while people in Gaza were exterminated. While there was so much hatred. While we’re destroying the world by causing climate change. All that and the fact that groups like Extinction Rebellion manifested itself confused me. All I could do is paint, be myself, keep on living. A lot happened since. For me my life changed when I became grandfather. I grew older, retired from my job that I did aside being an artist. Normal life, but still.
I’m strongly indepted to conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner.
POV 5: The lonely artist. Alone in the attic. Or somewhere else. Melancholic longing for what was and what will come. Waiting for inspiration. Yoga. Meditation. Embracing nothingness.
