early work

‘Rijtje eitjes op bakstenen’, 1983, olie op board, 12×45 cm

‘Vijf eitjes’, 1983, olie op paneel, 10,5×42,5 cm

‘Tweemaal sloeg de zeis toe die dag’, 1984, olie op board, 17×23 cm.

‘Mariannne op rode bank’, 1983, olie op board, 29,5×30 cm

‘Naakt op witte bank’, 1983, olie op board, 25,5×40 cm

‘Drie mosselen op bakstenen’, 1983, olie op paneel, 12×30 cm

‘Stilleven met paddestoelen’, 1983, olie op paneel, 43×43 cm

‘Kauwtje’, 1983, olie op board, 42×25,5 cm

‘Portret van een jongeman’, 1982, olie op board, 32,5×13,5 cm

‘Eenhoorn no.1’, 1984, olie op board, 152×122 cm

Drawings and paintings 1982 – 1992

My most important professors at ‘Academie Minerva’, Groningen NL, were Piet Pijn and Matthijs Röling. Piet never showed his own work, so nobody knew what he was making. But it was clear, that, at home, he had to be a naturalistic or at least a figurative painter with a razor sharp feeling for form and color. He acted very strict and could get extremely angry when you diverged his line. “If you like to paint like that, leave and go to Martin Tissing!”, he yelled at me, as I came one morning into his classroom and showed him some nicely composed and colorful paintings, but they were without any fuguration. To me, Martin Tissing was miles ahead and I wanted to learn só much more about color. I knew I had to stay near to Piet Pijn for a longer time….

Matthijs Röling became the professor who guided me towards the exams. In the newspapers he was said to be the “Last of the Old Masters”. His ‘color cards’ were known by all figuratively working students. Matthijs had ‘invented’ them after the example of the city walls that were painted on Renaissance works such as the ‘Allegory of good and bad city administration’ bij Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena, Italy. He took books for you from his home, if he thought it would be good for you to study a particular painter. Matthijs painted with a virtuoso ease and he also taught how ‘nót-to-paint‘: keeping the painting open wherever possible. He painted very precisely, where it should be very precisely and very volatile, where it has to be very volatile.

I passed my exams successfully and there were praising words in the regional newspapers bij Eric Bos and Friggo Visser. Galerie owners cam by, they were not the least ones. But after my first joy about this, there was a fear of how to continue the success. Besides that, I had to take care of my home and the first few children that were born.

During my study and the first few years after that, I was mostly drawing and painting still lives and landscapes in a somewhat impressionistic style and I also worked from model. But at that time I never considered myself as a painter of models or a portraitist. But over the years and thanks to Piet Pijn and Matthijs Röling my feeling for color had been increasing, which was mentioned explicitly in the reviews about my artwork.

In 1991 I was able to sell quite a bit of work, but it was never enough to support my family and I had to make the economic choice to become a school teacher. It was shortly after we had chosen for the Montessori primary school in Drachten, province of Friesland, for our oldest son, I started a post-education training program to be a Montessori teacher. Soon I got a few hours at the same school as where my son went. One year later we moved, because I could get a position at het Montessori primary school in Emmen, province of Drenthe.