SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Born: 1957, Ezinge, the Netherlands
Education:
1978 – 1984 Academie Minerva, Groningen, NL (painting and graphic arts; professors: Piet Pijn and Matthijs Röling)
2012 – 2014 Academie Minerva, Groningen, NL (Bachelor in Art and Design in Education)
Lives and works since 2018 in Valthe and was working as an art teacher at Esdal College, Emmen, NL, until 2024.

Ben Kersaan, biographical notes.

Ben Kersaan, born 1957 in Ezinge, province of Groningen, the Netherlands, was educated in traditional form and techniques between 1979 and 1984 and started as a painter and draftsman of still-lives and landscapes in oil and pencil. He was said to be belonging to a Dutch group named by some critics as the ‘Noordelijke Realisten’, Northern Realists. They are mostly painters that were professors and their students from ‘Academie Minerva’ at Groningen, in the Northern part of the Netherlands. Ben’s work characterized itself by impressionistic realism and was distinguished by the feeling for color and a relativized approach, as a kind of ‘anti-realism’. Such words by Eric Bos, art critic from the ‘Nieuwsblad van het Noorden’, the regional newspaper.

In a few years exhibitions in the region will follow: still-lives, mythical animals and landscapes, in drawing as well as in painting. The circle of live and death is often a theme in his artwork too.

His development as a visual artist cannot really be seen as a linear path and Ben Kersaan’s art work cannot be framed to one style.

The first few years Ben Kersaan had some growing success with his still-lives and landscapes. In 1991 the nature of his work changes as is being shown in his is last early exhibition that was called “Ten times breathing to become this bat”: 320 repetitive drawings of the same dead bat. The message was ‘how one should look in order to see, by, in a way, creeping into the subject, to feel the object as from inside out, to almost become the object, it is all about deep attention to the object, a technique Ben named “Looking-Drawing”, that is partly influenced by his interest for Zen-Buddhism. To Ben it is an approach that may look like the koan, the paradoxical riddle given by the Roshi, the Master, to the Zen student. Between 1987 and 1992 he gave courses teaching this technique.

Nevertheless Ben was insecure about his work and the living as a visual artist, making not enough money to feed his growing family. Also there was a disappointment and a kind of resistance inside Ben to be part of an art world that, to him, seemed to be ruled by jealousy and big mouths and gallery owners trying to tell him what art to make and what not…

In the summer of 1992 Ben became a teacher at the Montessori primary school in Emmen, the province of Drenthe. This job, plus building a home for his family, sometimes with the help of friends, but largely with his own two hands, made that there was no time to make art. After eight years he took the step to become a teacher in mathematics and Dutch language and there were also a few hours of art teaching at a school for secondary education. As he went back to Academie Minerva in 2012 for a Bachelor Study in Design and Art Education in order to get a fulltime job as an art teacher, the message of one of the professors to him was “You are not only already a good teacher, but see and remember this: you are also a good visual artist!” It took this remark to start painting again on a regular basis, now with a lot more self-confidence.

He then already had started with a discipline of making at least one drawing each day of small objects: a dead leaf or dead insects etcetera, in Indian ink, as an exercise in his Looking-Drawing. He also made some large paintings of horses after some older sketches and made them with papier-maché in relief, like they were paintings on prehistoric cave walls. It was an answer to a question about originality or authenticity and on the other hand the idea that the visual artists of today all stand on the shoulders of ancestors, going back to most ancient times…

In 2014, although keeping the one-drawing-per-day-discipline and besides painting some landscapes in oil in a realistic impressionist style, overtime the figurative image disappears from the large ‘horse paintings’. The focus is on the relief, the colors and the ceramic-glaze-like skin of the acrylic paint. Therefore Ben is calling them ‘Glazes’. The measurements become larger, but should be looked at from a close distance; the works may remind us of Mark Rothko.

Although the work changed more and more to abstract, observation, looking, reacting on what is seen, is still very important. You might say Ben Kersaan has not just one style, one might call his artwork even rather eclectic in styles as well as in techniques. Both, figurative and abstract, are shown at the same time. Ben says he likes to keep it that way.

Common denominator seems to be his feeling for color. Earlier, Eric Bos, the critic who had ‘invented’ the name ‘Noordelijke Realisten’, mentioned this explicitly when Ben Kersaan had his final exhibition from the art academy.

Ben’s artwork changes from modest figurative impressionism to colorful expressionism, from tiny , drawings of insects and small still-lives to his large color-field-like ‘Glazes’ in which only color and texture are important.

And besides that there are the monumental paintings for his 1916/17 ‘Palestine-project’. Again there is the figurative image and in we may recognize Picasso’s “Guernica”, Rubens’s “The Consequences of War”, Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindlers’ List” and Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwesh from his bundle “Hálat Hisár” (“Under Siege”), starting with the line “When the airplanes disappear, doves will fly up…”. The four large paintings (together they have the same measurements as Picasso’s “Guernica”) + the title box (to change day and place of an Israeli attack in the title every day) together all called “Is that uncle Mohammad lying there? (+date+place)”, thus five parts being only one work of art. The work is inspired by the story of one of his pupils at the school, Serah Shat, a Palestinian girl, about an Isreali attack on Tel al Hawah, Gaza, 2014. The house Serah lived in was destroyed and the man she called Uncle Mohammed was killed….. – Ben Kersaan has friends on both sides: Palestinians as well as Jews; his wish, as a human being and as a Buddhist, is to have peace for the whole world!

Probably causing the way to have such a variety in work may be a variety of influences too. Of coarse there are his professors Piet Pijn and Matthijs Röling at Academie Minerva, both painters of realism, who pointed Ben at color and Italian Renaissance. Two other professors, Wim van Veen and Hans Heeren pointed Ben Kersaan at Far East painters and graphic artists, such as Sengai and Hiroshige, and at Zen-Buddhism.

After he passed his exams from the academy also the prehistoric cave paintings like those of Chauvet Cave got Ben’s attention. Both, Far East ink paintings, going back hundreds of years and taught in books like the 17th century Chinese ‘The Mustard Seed Garden of Painting’ and Shozo Sato’s ’The Art of Sumi-e’, plus the works of the ancient cave painters, gave him answers to the question marks Ben placed at words like ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’. Overtime one may add Dutch-American Frederick Franck, Frans Dille, a graphic artist from Belgium, Rik Wouters and James Ensor, both from Belgium too, French impressionist Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Mark Rothko, maybe surprisingly Marc Chagall, another professor at Academie Minerva: lyrical expressionist painter Martin Tissing, Giorgio Morandi, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Motherwell, Nicolas De Staël, Richard Diebenkorn, Josef Albers, Japanese Sanzo Wada, Howard Hodgkin, Joan Mitchell, the portraits made by Edvard Munch, these in a kind of order of appearance to Ben, one might say.

A heavy accident in March and following surgery in June 2020 on a broken neck-vertebra, caused an alteration in size and choice of materials in Ben’s work. He could not make the large ‘Glazes’ in acrylic anymore, nor the tiny drawings of insects in pen and ink; he couldn’t find the right posture to make them. While sitting in a comfortable chair and watching TV he made ‘notes’ of the blurred TV-backgrounds on ‘post-its’ and worked them out with colorful Sennelier oil pastels, standing at the dinner table. It took two years before he could work some larger again: in the past he had collected old, secondhand frames, made panels in them to paint on, plus on the frames themselves, with acrylic, still working at his dinner table. Some of the paintings are inspired by the war in Ukraine, that started February 2022.

In the spring of 2024 Ben Kersaan started life-size head-to-feet portraits of friends and family members, never thinking he would ever be a portraitist. And again he will go explore his surroundings: the agricultural landscape that goes back to medieval and even prehistoric times nearby the village where he lives today, Valthe, living and working in a former school building.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
2024 Francesca Brunello, Catalogue E-ME, Eunoia Curators Collective, Vicenza, Italy.
Francesca Brunello, Catalogue Electro Zenit, Eunoia Curators Collective, Vicenza, Italy.
Anthology VII, Guto Ajayu Culture / Capital Culture House. Madrid, Spain.
1992 Beeldende Kunstenaars in Friesland, Frysk Keunstynstitút /Friese Pers, Leeuwarden, NL.
1991 Ben Kersaan, Tienmaal ademen om deze vleermuis te zijn, eigen beheer, Drachten, NL.
1986/90 Ben Kersaan, Kijken-Tekenen, Verwondering als een weg, eigen beheer, Drachten,
NL.

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