Family project - 2

Check the local newspaper here!

It's finished - the mural in the bakery of my family.
It was received well -  a local newspaper put a picture of the baker on the front page, with a good view on the mural as well.


I guess it's not because this is such a great mural on itself - the work is good, but that's not the point.
It's the full package that makes it worthwhile. The windmill itself, one of the few ones in Holland that still grind wheat. The baker, who is a very good baker - he had a bankrupcy due to circumstances outside of his power, but his old customers are coming back because they really like his bread. My brother has sown his own wheat on the lands behind the mill, so they'll have a cradle-to-cradle honest product soon. The mill is standing in a very rural, far-away area - it used to be a poor and backward part of the country, but now it's considered a beautiful countryside, people like to make the extra trip to the mill, and the village's  inhabitants feel rich having a  baker again. The mural accomplishes this picture, of a new rural culture and way of living - poverty turned into riches. I went away to develop art, but came back to see it fall in its place. Here's the bakery's website (it's in Dutch)


This kind of work is different from my canvases, it's both smaller and larger than that. Smaller, because this work requires a more serving attitude. The design is often made together with the client, colors are matched to the flooring and furniture, the design is composed and cut according to the client's and the space's needs and wishes. It's not like a direct individual expression, like a canvas can be. For a galerist, this kind of work is really not interesting.


But for me, if this kind of work succeeds, it's larger than the individual stuff: better, richer and sweeter. The quality is more hybrid, more positive and sunny, there's a more general quality to it. I like doing projects like this very much, it makes me grow out of myself. I hope to do a lot more in the future.

Energy

Here in Europe, 'energy' has become a popular term, when things are discussed from a spiritual point of view. Often it's actually used to indicate a mood, a feeling, someone's intent or a subconscious idea. Stuff like that is hard to explain, and when you try, it usually slips through your fingers and withers into something trivial. But when you call it "energy", you don't have to explain anything: it neutralizes all the content, and even the need to understand that content. At the same time, it gives the message that this intangible thing actually has an effect, and by using the word 'energy' the speaker also suggests one can actually feel this power. All that without having to be specific (which obviously takes an extra thinking effort). All in all, it's really a convenient word.
But I don't like it.
 It's such a material term. It says so little. Energy equalizes concepts like electricity, a mood, feeling, or intent. The latter obviously have nothing to do with household appliances or other machinery. Instead of 'energy', it would be better to call it feeling or intent. The word energy is only used to indicate some form of power. Feelings or intent are generally thought to be futile, the least powerful things in the world. That's an illusion, because human intent is one of the most powerful things in the world. 

A Japanese scientist, dr. Emoto, researches the quality of water. He freezes water in ice crystals (like a snow flake), and judges the quality of the water by the strength and beauty of the water crystals. Tap-water in big cities, or polluted water often isn't capable of forming a proper crystal structure. But when water is exposed to prayer, friendly words or classical music, it actually regains its structure. According to dr Emoto, words and feelings are a powerful energy source, and he made this idea available to lots of people. He also uses the 'energy'-word, but at least he indicates what it means - thoughts and feelings. So I chipped in a prayer when he called for communal prayer for the water in Fukushima nuclear plant. It's still a funny idea that this might actually work - thoughts like that easily wander off to funny psychological areas. We're not omnipotent, we don't do everything ourselves - it's more like angels following our attention, and start working where we put it. But no one should underestimate oneself in this respect. What we think and feel is important. It has an effect on our selves, our relatives and our environment.

I've spoken to people who are very much interested in finding new forms of energy - free energy. They're inspired by scientists like Nikola Tesla, J.E. Keeley, Wilhelm Reich and Victor Schauberger. Often they're into conspiracy theories as well. Once I spoke to such a person. He explained that this energy he was looking for, was not like electricity at all. He expected it to be more like a feeling, a precious thing, like the essence of  your heart. I asked him: "So, would you use this essence of your hart to power that lamp?", while pointing at the lamp over the table. He laughed because of the cheeky question. But I wasn't really joking. 


The search for energy is a lot like a goldrush. Searchers have the best intentions in mind (generally about saving the world), but there's an edge to it: a quest for things, that really should be obtained by hard inner work, meditation, and a fearless acknowledgement of one's own moral status. Instead of math and concepts like "force" or "power". It's all about thoughts, feelings and intent.

Newsflash

Ten days ago I brought my work to a gallery in Arnhem, a town 60 miles from Amsterdam. The gallery is a beautiful 19th-century mansion, and offers both traditional African art and contemporary fine art. We puzzled for a bit, and I just received pictures of how it's hanging. One piece is sold! Here's the gallery website (Hope will be updated soon).

Snapshots on the left (more pics here)

Just heard this one's sold

The bottom work is by Ad Gerritsen, my friend and former art teacher

I'm happy. For bigger pics, check http://www.painting-ideas-and-tecnhniques.com/art-gallery.html

Alchemist Vessel

About the title: the alchemist vessel, that's just me. I'm into esoterics and inner development, read a lot on the subject, but making art is still my favorite way to work with these things. To me, art is a form of alchemy.

Funny enough, I found that working with inner development was not at all fashionable in art school (in the late 80's). Times did change since then, but I do understand why it was so. Art was just coming loose from tradition, to make way for individual development. When you go a path like that, it's necessary to start as a non-believer. One has to work with one's own raw material. When accepting ideas about higher worlds or inner development, that raw material starts to hurt and one might be less creative for a while (it happened to me too). 

There was also Darwinist ideology that had a big influence in the art world. Abstract expressionism - the painter as the sublime genious animal. Objectivity being only possible as a passive material given ('only matter is real'). Stuff like that.  People who were naieve enough to paint elfs in art school were evicted from school for that, without proper explanation of reason. Formally, there were no rules and all was allowed, but as soon as spirituality became a topic, all doors would shut in your face. Thank goodness somehow this power is broken. 

Still there was a good thing about this attitude, for me it was a necessary phase. How else would one become ready to really create one's own moral codes? Only when there's no moral code anymore, you have to make your own. Artists who create their own moral code from scratch, almost always make good work, or at least work that is of real use to other human beings (and artists). There are a lot of artists that I don't particularly like, but that are valuable to me because they're consequent and show exactly where their ideas lead them. This is a contribution to artistic alchemy as well, even though transformation is not always succesful. 


I've seen so many connections between art and alchemy, that I don't know where to start. As inside, as outside: a painting really is a mirror of the body and soul (check here for more on that). Form, color and gesture really are a language one can speak in, and relate very directly about what's going on inside. Color to me is a carrier of consciousness, moving between warmth and light (here more on color).
As above, as below: when a person really shows things as honest and precise as possible, while making an artwork, it's bound to touch and resonate with universal truth. 


Before, the alchemist vessel was a bronze cauldron, where the process took place in matter. Alchemy used to be about transforming material substances (and trying to evolve with that, while conducting the process). But since a few decades, inner alchemy can be based on working with warmth as well. We are the cauldron, and our lower nature is being processed.
Creativity, along with social behaviour, is the key to all inner development. I didn't know at first that one can be creative in all professional fields, so I chose to become an artist.  But alchemy is in all these places where people are creative - science, raising kids or trying to channge society for the better. It's also in tv-shows where people try to improve themselves (psychologically etc). 
To work alone in a studio, making art, may be one of the least suitable ways to actually do that. By the time I found out about that, it was too late. And that suits me, because I love what I do. But that's another story. 

Family project - 1

This is the underpainting for a mural in the new bakery, in the company of my family.

My parents own a Dutch windmill, which is still operating thanks to the tenacity of my grandfather. It survived industrialisation, poverty, bad luck (accidents happening to its owners) and fire.  It lies next to the border with Germany (with whom we were at war a few decades ago). But the countryside is truely lovely, and the mill finally is starting to flourish, thanks to renewed eco-consciousness, and the take-over of my youngest brother.

Recently a new bakery was built in the mill, where the mill's flour is turned into bread. I was invited, to make a mural in the bakery. I wanted it to become extra really good, and I've been breeding on it for weeks, trying to figure out something good.

here's their website

Reconciliation with my background has been an ongoing process over the years. As a teenager I was a weird little punkrock girl who wanted to go to artschool (in a region where there was no music or art present at all). My grandfather, the miller, firmly believed in me, even when I looked outrageous. The rest of my relatives had serious doubts. But I went, thanks to the government system of scholarship, and I've been doing art ever since (with variable succes levels and in between having kids, but I kept on it - I'm still here). About my family: they never stopped supporting me, even though they didn't have a clue to what I want from life. I don't mind - they care about me, and if I ever would get to kill somebody, they'd hide me.
Family stuff is a bit like fertilizer - sometimes it smells bad (after all it's dung), but it sure helps things grow.

One huge painting of me is in my parent's house already. Now I'll be doing the bakery. I'm halfway the project, and it's turning out well so far. The mill has always been the eye-apple of my grandfather. Even at his very old age, when he didn't reconize his relatives' faces anymore, his consciousness would clear up when you'd tell him about the mill. That he'd know and remember.

I'm sure the bakery would fulfill his big dream. I guess that's why this project is so important to me. I've been wrestling with the design for weeks, and I think I'll take a major step in my artistic development by making this mural. Who would have thought that fifteen years ago...

Cloud Factory

I love clouds, and cloud factories even more.
Amsterdam lies within the circle of a modest highway (where, in places, one can't go faster than 80 km per hour), and on this highway, there's a cloud factory. Adults know this is the place where the city's garbage is burned, but most kids are convinced that this is the place where the clouds are made. They come out of the pipe, white and fluffy, in a steady flow - day and night.
I'm no kid - I'm an artist. But kids and artists have much in common. We have to be naive in order to be true. Some 'naive' descriptions are just more accurate than the so-called objective truth. Ever heard of that Amazon indian who first saw a bulldozer? He reported back in his village: "I saw a big monster, who made a human being destroy the trees". That's more true than saying that the human actually masters the machine. Because we don't, do we. We don't particularly like to destroy trees - that's just collateral damage, when making profit.

Clouds are like thoughts and feelings. They float up, they change shape and color all the time, grow and disappear, catch the light or spread it. Clouds show that things are real, even if you can't grasp them with your hands. For me as a painter, clouds are a basic thing. With clouds you can create worlds and moods without having to become specific. They give room for interpretation. Sometimes that's just annoyingly vague, but some things cannot be said or painted, only suggested. That's where I use clouds. When you can paint clouds, you can make anything happen.
Clouds are not just air, you know. Often they have a huge electric charge. Air shouldn't be taken for granted either. All the air in the world is one body, that sits on it when you try to open a vacuum jar. Thoughts and feelings are like that too. But more on that on another day.