Looking back on 2022

Around Newyear 2022, I moved into a new studio in the Biotoop in Haren. After eight years of working in a pleasant but not overly spacious room, I was able to move to a large studio. A wonderful space. With its own water supply, too. Also in the walls, incidentally, resulting in unusual mushroom growth, but that only became apparent later. With the new studio, a new subject also came my way: origami animal figures. In one of the first weeks, after a day's work, I was about to go home and picked up a book from the shelf. A book about paper and craft techniques. It featured a folded penguin and I immediately fell in love with the image, the shape, the surfaces. I immersed myself into the art of origami folding. It sparked a stream of ideas that I have been working on for three years now.

I made the painting Japanese Whispers II for a group exhibition at the With Tsjalling gallery, with the theme Copy/Paste. I drew on the postcard series, but I also incorporated an origami hare. I painted the canvas Death Is Not the End especially for the Belvédère Museum, for an exhibition about death.

1. Hare, oil on panel, 17.5 x 15 cm, 2022

2. Fox, oil on panel, 21 x 14 cm, 2022

3. Japanese Whispers II, oil on panel, 80 x 61 cm, 2022

The postcard features the painting The Red Kimono by George Hendrik Breitner, and the title is taken from a song by The Cure.

4. Death Is Not the End, oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm, 2022

On the postcards from left to right: George Edmund Butler, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Käthe Kollwitz, Charlie Toorop, Marlene Dumas, Édouard Manet, Edvard Munch, and Gustav Klimt. The title is taken from a song by Bob Dylan.