ART CART (0)
My road to making art is lined with special people pointing the way, and paved with coincidences and serendipity. I’ve always loved to draw and paint. I became a lawyer. Drawing and painting were for vacations. But I had the luck to work for a law professor who had a world-renowned modern art collection. That primed my tastes in art.
I got married and moved from my home in the Netherlands to New York. After two years we returned to the Netherlands, where a friend dragged me to her art lessons. To my surprise I was pretty good at it. After another two years I moved to Paris, France, where I worked as a lawyer and became a mother. That is a very, very, busy existence. Again, drawing and painting was for vacations. After seven years I moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, and guess where I lived: right next door to the Johannesburg Art Foundation. I lived there six years and began to hang out with artists and took art lessons at the Foundation and with individual artists. In 2001 we moved to Washington, DC, and I enrolled at the Corcoran College for Art + Design.
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One of my first watercolors (1988), of my father, who had died two years earlier, and my first oil painting (2000) |
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At the Corcoran College I learned what art is – I didn’t always agree. I tried all manner of painting and drawing techniques, and learned to critique others and myself. I started painting large wild and colorful canvases that made people think I was on drugs (I wasn’t; unless wine counts as such). And then I got stuck. I realized I was terrified of failure. When you come off the high of producing art that pleases you and that people like and even buy, you fall into a bottomless pit. I guess it is the same for everybody: producing results you can’t be happy with is absolutely horrible. I cramped up. I stopped making art.
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One of my wild and large canvases – “Under the Greenwood Tree” (2011) |
I have an art guru, Judy Southerland, so I went to sob at her feet and pray at her knees. She suggested I choose a shape and play around with it. I chose a bare tree shape. Trees are very important to me. Since then, all my pieces are based on that shape. It’s become my crutch, an artistic version of Linus’ blanket.
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This is me and the bare tree shape I chose, I believe it was in 2010, and I have stuck with it ever since |
In 2012 I had joined Studio Gallery in Washington, DC, and remained a member for 4 years. I had to focus and produce a lot of work; the galleries at Studio are huge. I was ready for that (I had a large solo show in 2014, “Elementrees”) but in the end my life also extends into Virginia, where I spend most of my time and where I had joined the Middle Street Gallery in Washington, VA. I concentrated on that gallery after 2016.
It was at the end of that year that something troubling prompted me to seek refuge in a new series of smaller paintings, which I called “Doodling in Darkness”. They are also based on the tree shape but the interpretation of the shape is less formal. I apply base color(s) with Black Montana Graffiti spray paint and draw the images, without any plan, with Posca acrylic paint pens. It’s a lot like automatic drawing and it puts me in a dreamlike state. The plan was to make 50 pieces – I am currently working on number 35. I had a solo show last year with the first 25 and will have another show this December in VA at Middle Street Gallery with whatever I will have finished then. The entire series will feature in a large solo show at the Arts Club of Washington, DC, in May of 2020, which will hopefully include #50. In the meantime I moved to Capitol Hill (but still live mostly in VA) and have joined CHAL. I participated with 2 pieces in the show TREEmendous, one of which was awarded 2nd in Show. I’m a happy painter again.
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Here are 20 of my Doodling in Darkness pieces, in my VA studio, prior to last year’s show in VA |
