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.
hansboer.nl
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.
drawings
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.
thesiscovers bookcovers
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.
nannadeklerk.nl
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.
paintings
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.
posters
contact: info@kees4arts.nl