'flat' paintings
‘Flat’ paintings 2022
In the spring and early summer of 2022 I was recovering from an accident and still not able to work at an easel, but I was standing beside the dinner table and the painting was lying on its surface, but the possibilities of movement in my neck, back, sholders and arms were increasing two years after my heavy fall, so I slowly could make larger paintings again. In the past I had collected old secondhand frames and now I made panels in them to paint on, plus I had the idea of painting on the, sometimes damaged, frames themselves with acrylic paint.
Shortly after I had done the first of these ‘painting-on-the-frame’ paintings, my brother Jan pointed me at Howard Hodgkin, who also was painting the frames too. It was not the Howard Hodgkin ‘looks’ that influenced my way of painting; the images in my paintings were more arising or a continuation from the forms and colors from the year before as I was drawing the ‘Quaker’-series in oil pastel. But there is something else from Howard Hodgkin of which I am influenced by: I had to think of giving these new, more abstract, paintings a title and I did it in a similar way as Hodgkin, as being from a memory, a certain emotion or as a reaction in words to the colors I had painted. Colors that made me think of the Middle East I gave some Iran-connected titles (I had a pupil coming from Iran at the school; a friend is from Iranian origin and an art colleague, with whom I have some contact, lives over there); other paintings made me think of the colors that I see in the fields in the countryside nearby where I live. Still, one of these paintings has a direct connection to a Howard Hodgkin work, and yet, it has not…: in a book on his art I saw the painting “The Green Chateau”. Which I found strange, because the main color of the painting is red! It made me fantasize that than the surroundings of this chateau/castle had to be green, and I wrote a small poem, almost like a haiku:
“Beyond the border
A fierce forest
Of towering trees.”
The poem became the title of the painting including the painted frame, that originated from an old-fashioned mirror. At a later moment I found out that “The Green Chateau” isn’t a castle at all, but probably the name of a children’s indoor playground near Los Angeles, USA….
An other influence, this I won’t deny, is the one by Mark Rothko. Although you may think it is for the diffused rectangular forms: it is not; those are derived from, or a continuation to, the ‘Quakers’, my oil pastel series from 2021. It is more the way I build up the fields of color; layer upon layer, 20, maybe up to 40 thin layers of often transparent pigments in acrylic, giving an also diffused depth, as like in Rothko’s paintings, sometimes mixed or finished with some color crayon or chalks.
This group of paintings I call “Flat Paintings”, more to give then a collectieve name than something else, I can’t point at a series larger than three, but because they share a kind of ‘flatness’, not showing any line perspective. In my early painting years, still on the Art Academy, at a time I was painting a large still-live in a cabinet from quite nearby and I found out that all I had learned about line perspective did not work for that particular painting. From that moment on in many of, or maybe especially, the still-lives, I tried to avoid line perspective, making objects in the background important, thus playing with the space. True…., in the “Flat Paintings” here, leaving out line perspective, it is from a different order, while they are abstracts….