oil pastels
Oil pastel drawings 2020
A heavy accident in March 2020, the day before the Dutch Corona lockdown, and following surgery in June on an broken neck vertebra, caused an alteration in size and choice of materials in my work. I could not make my large ‘Glazes‘ in acrylic anymore, nor the tiny drawings of insects in pen and ink. I couldn’t find the right posture to make them. I had to rest a lot and sat in my comfortable chair watching all the news about Corona and during the statements from our Prime Minister and other officials, I was making ‘notes’ about form and colors of the blurred backgrounds on ‘post-its’ and later on worked them out with colorful Sennelier oil pastels. The pastels were new to me and I was drawing on brown Kraft packaging paper, standing at the flat surface of the dinner table.
Although these drawings seem to be very abstract, they are all made after/by observation, reacting on what is seen. Even the composition was given by the visible image of those blurry backgrounds; OK, it was I who made the choice of what part of these backgrounds seemed interesting to me: attractive forms and colors… Most of these drawings are made on Kraft paper, brown packaging paper, used for a second time, not all tidy and with torn corners, measurements are all about 15×15 cm. Most of the time the drawings are ‘Untitled’ but with the date added, few times the (most) used colours are mentioned
A colleague from Iran, Abbas Mirzaei, called these works “poetical expressionism” and although to my experience they were one hundred percent made by observation, I guess he might be right.
Oil pastel drawings 2021
The same ‘style’ name “Poetical Expressionism” may be given to a following series of oil pastel drawings and again observation is part of the process, but different than before.
The source of these drawings is very trivial: they are made on cardboard packages of (at first) muesli cereal boxes. Different brands use different colors for different tastes, blue for nuts, green for apple, red for fruits, giving me the chance to make a whole series of drawings in which I could react to the already presented colors by covering them with tones of similar colors, making all the printed text disappear….
There is some ambivalence about the titles. I call them “Untitled” followed by naming the used colors, sometimes I add the date, but there can also be a kind of ‘code’ added. The choice for that code has a comparable triviality: they are the brands of the cereals (Quaker or IMY = I love MY cereals), “reverse” means the backside of the package, “odk” stands for “op de kop“, meaning upside down in the Dutch language.
“In Conversation with Morandi, Albers, Wada and Tissing“-series 2022
At the very end of 2021 an other alteration appeared. It started with an advertisement for some kind of PIN or debit card. It was just a small image and I did the same thing as with the cereal boxes: I covered the image with oil pastel, reacting on the colors that were already there, divided in a few narrow vertical strokes of color.
Coincidentally the top parts of the rice boxes in my kitchen had the same measurements as the image from the advertisement: 8×12 cm. The rice boxes are cardboard, better than the magazine paper from the advertisement….
Although this time not reacting on the colors on the cardboard of the box, which was almost all orange, I started making drawings, again in oil pastel on chosen parts, always cut back to 8×12 cm: vertical strokes of withheld, reserved colors on an off-white background.
The sequence of the mostly soft colored vertical strokes made me think of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. The colors also reminded me to Martin Tising, one of the professors at ‘Academie Minerva’, the Art Academy in Groningen, NL, where I went as a student. He was known to be an ‘lyrical expressionist’, at that time a complete different style as I was making and dissuaded to go to by another professor I studied with. Sadly I never got to know Martin Timing that well, he died, caused by falling off his bike, not long after I met him accidentally, many years later, at my brother’s restaurant, also in Groningen.
Another coincidence was that I found some books on Josef Albers and by Japanese Sanzo Wada, and, to me, I felt that all four of their artistic language came back in these small oil pastel drawing. It felt as like I was talking with all four of them…
This is why I named the series “In conversation with Morandi, Albers, Wada and Tissing“.