the bat
“Ten times breathing to be this bat“, 1990
These 11 drawings in Chinese ink on Kraft packaging paper glued on cardboard, each measuring 100×70 cm, together from just one work of art titled “Tien maal ademen om deze vleermuis te zijn”, “Ten times breathing to be this bat”.
It began during an exhibition in the ‘Bleekerhûs Museum’ at Drachten, NL, today known as ‘Museum Drachten’, just a few years after I passed my exams as a visual artist at ‘Academie Minerva’, Groningen: I believed something was wrong with the still lives and landscapes and unicorns. They were too neat, decent, too easy. Change the order in a still live and I could paint another one and another one. Nothing wrong with earning some money, but for me…., I missed the ‘heart’. But how to solve this problem?’
Half a year later I knew it was all about ‘attention’, attention for the object that was drawn or painted. You have to creep into the object, to feel it from inside out, to become, to be the object. Looking back at the time, I guess all real visual artists work this way, but I needed it to understand, to ‘write it down and read it over’. I now believe there was nothing wrong with the paintings I had made so far at that time, but it was my fear of the trap of success and money and what this could do to my growing ideas of ‘painting from the heart’. Although I had a small knowledge of Zen-Buddhism, at that time it gave me enough clues for a better, more ‘honest’ approach, an approach that was led by the heart, not by the wallet.
A few years later, it was February 1991, there was a complete different exhibition at the same Bleekhûs Museum: eleven 100×70 cm frames carrying eleven drawings on brown Kraft packaging paper, glued on cardboard. Eight of them with repetitive pen an ink drawings of the same dead bat. A visitor counted 320, three of the frames showed a ca. 30 cm circle, in Japanese called ‘enso‘, also in ink, but made with a brush. Two of them had a text, the very last one was just the ‘enso’.
I wrote a small booklet to guide the exhibition, I guess this exhibition, together with the booklet, gave me a guide post to travel with and to continue my work.
But yet it turned out to be different: I had to make an economic choice for my growing family and I became a teacher. In the summer of 1992 we moved from Drachten to Emmen were I began a job as a teacher at the Montesori primary school that had started two years earlier. In 1995 “Ten times breathing to be this bat” had a repetition as part of a larger exhibition called “Pintura Natura” in the ‘Natuurhistorisch Museum’ Museum for Natural History, Groningen, NL.