Painting silence, painting lightness – meaning and ‘semiose’

maart 12, 2025maart 13, 2025 — art, landschap, sumi-e — 4 min read

Living in cities the possibility exists that you lost your connection with nature and with the surrounding landscape outside the inhabited world. Buildings and streets are part of your environment and they are now the new landscape you live in. Lost is the memory […]

I’m started painting in 1972. Two teachers, both artists, inspired me to choose my own themes and I experienced with different materials. They invited me to make big paintings on the walls of the class-room. That was also the first time I discovered the way of painting with pigments. In 1987-1988 I decided to paint only with pigments on a water-base. I’m using these pigments because the Japanese painter Kaii Higashiyama inspired me to do so. These pigments are mixed with casein or/and with an acrylicglossbind. Then diluted with water. Ten years long I only used the colour blue. Later I changed my pallet. In 1995 I discovered that the landscape was my most important theme and that I got my inspiration from the experience of the landscape. My reflection on this landscape has never stopped since then. I’m interested in a possible sacral dimension of the landscape, therefore I call myself a religious painter. The light in the landscape is for me a metaphorical reference for this sacral dimension of the landscape. I’m inspired by the work of Anselm Kiefer, Casper David Friedrich, Armando and Kaii Higashiyama, Van Gogh and many others. My landscapes are a testimony of freedom. Freedom of mind, freedom of experience. They are an attempt to express the experience of the real landscape in a painting. In a time where the real landscapes are “hiding” because our minds are more and more entangled in virtual reality-landscapes my paintings try to reveal the power of the real landscape -especially when you walk in it. Often I use photo’s. Sometimes these photo’s are old (1920-1940) and they give witness of a landscape that has gone. A history that has passed. I use also photo’s I made by myself of interesting landscapes like rivers, moors and mountains. These photo’s figure as a starting point to paint a totally new landscape. My paintings express the process of giving meaning to the landscape and the special attention I give to the horizon. Literal and metaphorical spoken heaven and earth are meeting in this horizon. The horizon can therefore be a starting point to think about your life: where do I come from, where I’m going to, and so on. Painting is for me a search for meaning and the landscape can be metaphorically speaking a road to self-understanding. I like the unexpected possibilities in painting (with water-based paint). I use the name canandanann for many years. It is a combination of two names and two myths (one from Mexico about the creation of the moon and one from Ireland about the forefathers of the Celts). It express also the importance of the poetical truth in life next to other kinds of truth. In different websites I have shown this. During the years I had small exhibitions in Amsterdam, Badhoevedorp, Normandy, The Hague, Deventer, Malden, Den Bosch, Münster and Nijmegen.

LANDSCAPES OF THE SOUL

Tag: painting

Painting silence, painting lightness – meaning and ‘semiose’