ArtMonkModern

2007-11-08T22:25:00.000+01:00

Food and Faces in Kleinjansen

2007-11-08T21:54:00.000+01:00

Food & faces, 7 faces in restaurant Klein Jansen,situated at the Hogeweg in the Watergraafsmeer area.Klein Jansen is highly rated(9)by Johannes van Dam,the famous food critic of Amsterdam.They are in the famous Michelin guide as well.
In the weekend a taste explosion called "the dream" will keep you dreaming for quite a while.
Recently they opened their second shop on the Linnaeuskade 3 where they sell their favourite wines,ready made wanna taste it all and ingredients to do it yourself.
Check out their site,www.kleinjansen.nl,and weblog,kleinjansen.blogspot.com.

2007-11-08T21:51:00.000+01:00

"Whisper in the West" Art Kitchen Show

2007-10-09T22:04:00.000+02:00

The beauty of as well as the complication in the Art world is that it takes time to get results. Time you invest in presentations may or may not pay out in the future or take a different turn all together. You simply don't know.

The "Whisper in the West" show in the Art Kitchen gallery is a fine example of how a plan can take a different turn and produce a result quite satisfying to say the least.

The Art Kitchen is a gallery where I had some great shows in the nineties but collaboration ended due to a severe case of art fatigue on my behalve. Once in a while I would visit the Artkitchen stand at the Kunstrai or the Rotterdam Art Fair to stay in touch.

I always send an invitation in case I exhibit my work. In response to the Noordwaarts 4 invitation I sent to the Art Kitchen I received an invitation for the Western show opening one week later!! It took some effort to produce a painting perfect enough to present but I managed to deliver the work, still wet and all, just one hour before the opening.

And sold it almost immediatly.

Noordwaarts 4

2007-10-09T20:52:00.000+02:00

The Noordwaarts open studio event was a happening with two faces. One very wet and one warm & sunny. The week before I transformed my studio into a nice cosy art club with classic wallpaper, arabic carpets and a (fake)leather bench with (fake)tiger skin. Food and drinks completed the event and invitations where sent to art loving people all over the country.

The problem though is that you can prepare as much as you like, the weather determines the succes of the event. So when it started raining on saturday my mood changed from sunny and hopefull to cloudy and depressed and I was glad I could close up for the day.

Sunday was a different day all together, the sun was out and from early start people showed up to take a look at the 70 participants and their work while outside soup an pancackes where served. All together Noordwaarts 4 was a succes.

Angelina Anderson

2007-09-10T12:44:00.000+02:00

This portrait consists of two faces. The face is that of Gillain Anderson(x-files)and the lips are Angelina Jolie's. Two world famous faces "sampeled"together in a new face. Plastic churgery in it's most perfect form, the dream of every Frankenstein surely. And there is more, the result of the two faces combined together show features of the Hellenistic beauty ideal used by artists in ancient Greece. As if ancient beauty still resonates in modern day convention on beauty.

Noordwaarts open studio's

2007-09-10T12:24:00.000+02:00

29th and 30th of September the fourth edition of Noordwaarts will take place at the Zamenhofstraat location.Small businesses and artist's studio's will open up for public accompanied by music,food&drinks.
I myself will be presenting new work in my studio located at 116e. Work consisting of portraitmaterial derived from the hyperreality of modern day media.Then taken apart,mixed with other faces and put together again in a sophisticated act of deconstruction and reconstruction and then painted on canvas in a realistic manner creating a new reality.
The reality of seductive painting wich according to me still is the best way to achieve communication between the object/subject and the beholder.

2007-06-29T10:25:00.000+02:00

"The origin of copies"is the title of the end product of research in which influences of the french philosopher Jean Beaudrillard where the main concept. The work is based on a sentence I found in a book on Beaudrillard by William Stearns and William Chloupka. The book was a result of the conference"Modern Communication and the Disappearence of Art and Politics"in Missoula,Montana.

"Disappearence of Art and Politics" is a great book in which Beaudrilard is challenged to defend his theories on U.S society published in Beaudrilards"Amerique" in front of a critical audience of academic specialists.

The sentence is as follows:

"The viral spread of "copies of copies without originals" may be devastating to"history"and the authenticity, but it is not without it's own(seemingly irresistible)energetic appeal"

For me this sentence clarified many developments in the visual arts and music alike,in which repetittion of information is basicaly the material you work with.

During the Nineties "my material' consisted of "the image bearers of modern time".

A4 and A3 copy paper on which images photographed from televisionscreens where xeroxed.

The images consisted mainly of soap opera stars in close up and daily news accompanied by English"subtitels"(Dutch television is subtiteled)

Then the paper was glued in a repetitive fashion on canvas which had the relative size of a television screen. Next step in the proces would be colouring the paper and painting selected images in a painterly fashion on the canvas as if to proclaim individuality over massmedia production.( yes! I will show you these paintings some day soon)

The painting above is in fact the last painting in this series and as you can see the soap and news images have changed into arrows giving certain velocity and direction to the image.

As the title suggests the influence of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is translated into the realm of represenation and put in the universal setting of a"Big Bang" symbolising the ever expanding universe.

In this case the question has to be"in near future,will we be able at all, to distinguise the original from the copy,the real from the false or the truth from the lie?"

Showdown at Bitterzoet(sweet)

2007-05-20T22:02:00.000+02:00

5th of april 2007

The try out of art friend John Cees Smit and band members was a new experience for me. Though their band, Scram C Baby, has already quite a succesfull music history, I shamefully have to admit, I've never heard a song of the band and have never visited a concert.

I must say this concert was an eye opener. John Cees is quite a performer. I already knew him to be a passionate painter but this was something else. Here was a guy getting into the spotlights and giving it all. And the music was the way I like it best, fast and furious.

The try out was for the promotional tour of their new cd, which took some effort to obtain because not every music store sold it. But once the cd, with the peculiar title" The thing that wears my ring "......, started pourring out of my music system in my studio, it has been pourring ever since.

Great music with a sound and lyrics that keep on buzzing around in your head, an asset to my music collection with famous names like Radiohead, Coldplay,

Snowpatrol, etc, etc. Scram C Baby has the freshness of a new british band and sometimes reminds me of the good old days of Punk and New Wave. Obviously you'll have to check out for yourself to find out what I mean although you may have some difficulty in locating the right store.

2007-03-26T23:35:00.000+02:00

John Cees doing art stuff with artist Rob Visje.

2007-03-26T23:34:00.000+02:00

Artist in fancy shirt in front of work by John Cees Smit.

2007-03-26T23:33:00.000+02:00

Art crowd in the living.

2007-03-26T23:31:00.000+02:00

The Studio renamed"studio 108"

Once the start is made.....

2007-03-26T22:52:00.000+02:00

everything else will be easy.

And what better way to start than with my own curated show ! Together with artfriend an colleague John Cees Smit, I organised an artshow in my appartment located on the Brouwersgracht in Amsterdam. Together with Riette Wanders(sculptures), Pim Portegies Zwart(photography), Sylvie Louvet(sculptures),Ramon Jan Vet( paintings), we put up our paintings and manged to create a suprisingly interesting show considering the differences in
concept and style the gathered artists work in . The opening was well visited and we even sold some works. All together a interesting experience with a certain follow up in the near future.