KEES 4 ARTS
KEES4ARTS
boer
Still Dutch
My father was a kind of chief of staff at the Shell, who died when I was
14. He had drawn cityscapes (copied) With a crown pen and made at
least one veneer painting. My mother had drawn a lot at school for
educational training, mainly illustrations for children's rhymes. At an old
age she tried to pick this up again, but that did not yield much.
Still, our family apparently had a talent for visual art, because all four
brothers were able to draw and the youngest Hans has even become a
worthy painter. In recent years he has exhibited a lot and also sells well.
Below a painting and a link to his website.
alkyd op linnen
2012 / 45 x 50 cm
The first real drawing, in which I drew something without any reason
in my spare time was the butterfly.
I was quite charmed by Jugendstil and
someone like Aubrey Beardsley, Mucha and Bilibin,
but more contemporary also from Melle.
Aubrey Beardsley
drawing
The postcard, which I subsequently
made, was also influenced by this.
Before that, my drawings had sometimes led to a request to make cover
plates for theses of colleagues at the Netherlands (Central) Institute for
Brain Research, where I worked for 10 years minus 1 month. There too,
sometimes that craving for Jugendstil and erotic details can be found.
This phallic circle from that
time shows
that I also
tried to
imitate
Escher
a bit.
I had learned to etch from Hettie Brink. I
wanted that to be able to produce more
drawings. A vain thought in two respects.
I did make a number of etchings, including
New Year's wishes (such as the left), but
that was it.
My specialization as a gynecologist began in
1979 and this was the last vagina dentata I
saw.
In addition, I was asked to make cover plates for scientific books, which I
naturally liked to do. When they decided to use the same image for the
cover of a series of books all the time and I got got busier in my training for
gynecologist, this form of creativity dried up. The most
frequently used cover was also the first of the book
series.
After a while, making thesis cover came back, when I
started supervising PhD students myself and often
offered them to make the cover plate, "an offer you
can’t refuse." I could even make a sporadic book cover, but then I first had
to write the book myself
Oil painting already started in the same period that I drew and sometimes
etched. Because of this my son was rushed to the hospital once at the age
of five, because he had been drinking a sip of
turpentine. That is really dangerous, but it
was a tiny bit and fortunately ended well. A
few small paintings and a surrealistic painting
of my son on 'innocentia', the cat, date from
that time.
In the period in the mid-eighties that I lived on my own, I started to paint
with acrylics and I made quick, coarse paintings mainly of red-haired
women. Not because I knew one, but because it was nicely colored. I
combined this with black conté lines, which
darkened the edge of the coloured parts. I got
that idea through a filmed interview with Willem
de Kooning, but that was also the only agreement.
Sybil Goldstein, a friendly artist from Toronto, said
that I painted more abstractly than my brother
Hans.
This also resulted in one of the first, if not the first, exhibition
organized by Heleen Dyserinck in the Medical Library of the AMC. That
exhibition in 1985 or 86 was with my friend Ton Hogervorst.
In 1985 I started to paint on a weekly basis with Tim (or Nanna) de
Klerk, who could do that a lot better than me and from whom I
learned some things. At that time I still painted with acrylic. But after
I got to know Mieke, those evenings were
continued with an increasing emphasis on
meals and socializing than painting. A
painting by Tim and the reference to her
website are given.
Nanna de Klerk
roses
The real painting, if you can speak of that, started when I was taught by
Ellis Tertoolen. In preparation for my retirement, I wanted to take
lessons to learn the old painting techniques. The contact with Ellis, after
she had painted Eva, gave it shape. Except for the first two evenings,
during which I received a lot of instructions, it was more painting with
Ellis and two or three other students.
This forced me, although not literally, to paint
portraits. On panel and a tempera underpainting you
built the painting with oil paint. Very nice. Although I
later replaced that (after a visit to Walter Elst, one
of the best fine painters at the moment) with alkyd
painting, I still actually use the techniques I learned
from Ellis.
In the first series, I compared a detail of an old
painting with a 20th-century painter (here Sittow
and Appel).
This was followed by a series of
villagers, what I originally wanted to
expand a little further. But I got tired of
portrait painting for a moment and just
before the death of Ellis, during a
vacation (Ellis now lived with Hans in
France), I started a painting, that I still
find one of my best. Sophie Six and a
distant ancestor Jan Six, a maire of
Amsterdam painted by Rembrandt.
Since 2009 I have been a member of the art collective Muiden /
Muiderberg. Apart from the fact that I am occasionally forced to make
paintings for an art route or exhibition in the town hall, since September
2012 I have also started making posters for the
exhibitions.
On this poster a joint exhibition of
the KCMM in the large church is
announced with a common theme.
contact: info@kees4arts.nl
