My work as visual sculpture artist

When I was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts I was fascinated by work of the “Stijlgroep”, Bart van der Leck, Piet Mondriaan, Vilmosz Huszar and Theo van Doesburg. Later, I came to deeply admire the work of Jan van Schoonhoven and Ad Dekkers. I also became acquainted with designers such as Frans van Nieuwenborg and Emmy van Leersum.

I grew to realise that, for me, constructed and mathematical forms held the most attraction, which, later, made me follow in the footsteps of the great artists named above.

Once, on a visit with fellow students to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the numerous tombs made me become aware of their logical form. The sketches I made I later used in the lessons on ceramics to construct a large tomb of modelling clay.

Unfortunately, it was too large to be baked. Or the oven was too small.

                                                  

I have also frequently sketched the so-called summer-houses on garden plots that abound in the Netherlands. They are usually constructed of scraps of wood and odd bits of board. Their seeming awkwardness held a poetic quality in my eyes. I used the enamel technique (among others) for these sketches.

To me, both the tombs and the summer-houses remained rectangles, squares and cubes.

I left the Academy, after my cum-laude graduation, full of enthusiasm and motivation to start my life as an artist. I was 40, a late-developer.

My work as an artist Captivated by the square, I knew I would do a lot of work in that direction.

For example:

Take a 5x5 cm square. Its diagonal is approximately 7 cm. To me this suggested the numbers 5, 2 and 7, so I constructed 64 7-cm cubes.

On the six sides of each of these cubes I put figures of 5x5 cm, 2x2 cm and 2x5 cm and painted them in the primary colours red, blue and yellow, plus white.

I also made 64 7-cm cubes and put them together to form one 28-cm cube.

The designs are painted on canvas of varying sizes, 100 cm2, 150 cm2, etc.