#andriesse

Jan Andriesse | The river below, Evening III

Time passed more slowly in those decades and there was more time available to simply enjoy family, friends and have some pleasure in your free time. No internet, not so many cars and less pressure on life made these times perhaps a better time to live in. The series is done by the best in dutch photography. There were 7 volumes done by Jan Blazer, Emmy Andriesse, Kees Scherer, Henk Jonker, Ad Windig,  Maria Austria and Sem Presser. All of them have been sold out since these books were almost published 20 years ago, but fortunately i have some titles available at www.ftn-books.com

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Emmy Andriesse found her artistic goal in photography. Het photographs belong to the best dutch photography has produced in the 20th century. People were her main subjects, but beside her portraits and scene photographs she proved to be an excellent landscape photographer too. At one time she travelled to Arles to photograph what van Gogh must have seen in his days and these photographs belong to the best ones she ever has made.

Book available at www.ftn-books.com. Het photographs have a social element which was rare and give an extra depth to the scenes she photgraphs.

The moment he came to me with the 2 freshly cut bundles of wild and cultivated flowers i knew the subject for todays blog, because at this moment the realization occurred to me ,that flowers are important in art too. Many artists have used the subject of flowers in their works. From very realistic. like Erik Andriesse to more abstract like Leo van Gestel ( from both http://www.ftn-books.com has publications available).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

But for many these will not be very well known or familiar names, but there are many more…… How about Monet? a flower painter “pur sang” and Vincent van Gogh.

Just look at all the great names in art, even the almost abstract painters, They all draw inspiration from flowers. Perhaps the most beautiful ones come from Georgia Ao’Keeffe. Realistic, dreamlike and mystic these are perhaps the very best flower paintings in the world.

There are some Eva Besnyö publications available at www.ftn-books.com 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

One of his techniques was to paint animals and use dead models to paint/draw them as accurately as possible. There is a nice video on YouTube  in which Marc Mulders and Erik Andriesse discuss this technique and some footage is shown while Erik is at work. A tremendous artist of whom some books are available at www.ftn-books.com

On the Andriesse site there is a nice text by Marlene Dumas in which she describes the works by Andriesse and concludes that not all of his works are naturalistic:

Nightmares of Beauty

Once upon a time there lived a boy called Erik Andriesse, who distinguished himself from the passionless people around him by glowing in the dark. Now the country he lived in was a quite dark. Artists however would talk about the extraordinary light in that country.

During the 80’s all the artists were interested in the artificiality of life. A picture of a flower was much more interesting than the flower itself. Very few people still believed that everything that existed was part of nature itself. People lived in cities. Artists lived in their studios. Places filled with books, bottles and talk about art and artists and what was relevant and what was not.

And they forgot to love…

But Erik was aware of the fire that eats at the heart, while the clock ticks at night. The shortage of time, the repetitive movements of desire, the energy of the body watched by death. Flowers larger than life, dreams larger than life.

Nightmares of beauty.

He was ignored by the calculators, whose blood did not rise, when they saw his exotic death-dances on paper, but he continued on his own impatient way. Erik is not a conceptual artist. Erik is not an associative artist. He is not interested in displaying the cultural-historical aspects of his subject-matter. But Erik is also not the naturalist he seems to be. He even shows similarities (at times) to Spiderman, the comic-strip hero. Erik is not a cultural barbarian or a primitive. He reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly of the artworld and the synthetic problems of painting.

MARLENE DUMAS, 1986

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA