House Party. 2018. 22.5 x 19.5 cm, oils.
Text and imagery: Gijsbert Witkamp
Version: 18 March 2019
I got into oil painting as a schoolboy when my father gave me a set of oil paints and brushes for my 13th birthday. After school I mostly did graphics and it was until 2014 that oil painting became the main medium of my art work.
My style is kind of eclectic taking things from here or there in a loosely post-modern manner. Generally I build a basic composition of clearly defined planes which are filled in a variegated manner that help to shape form and trigger of interpretative associations. I like the combination of explicitness and implicitness, of that what is clear and bounded coupled to what is ambiguous and vague. Such may apply to the image itself, its interpretation or concept, that what it might represent and the interplay of these elements.
Version: 18 March 2019
I got into oil painting as a schoolboy when my father gave me a set of oil paints and brushes for my 13th birthday. After school I mostly did graphics and it was until 2014 that oil painting became the main medium of my art work.
My style is kind of eclectic taking things from here or there in a loosely post-modern manner. Generally I build a basic composition of clearly defined planes which are filled in a variegated manner that help to shape form and trigger of interpretative associations. I like the combination of explicitness and implicitness, of that what is clear and bounded coupled to what is ambiguous and vague. Such may apply to the image itself, its interpretation or concept, that what it might represent and the interplay of these elements.
Space Mouse. 2014, 60 x 40 cm, oil on canvas.
A NOTE ON SPACE MOUSE
Space Mouse (2016, 40 x 50 cm, oils) is a homage to the first mouse - and through it to all other animals including homo sapiens itself - experimentally launched into thin air or less during the spacecraft race that dominated USA and USSR space technologies as of the sixties. Let it not be forgotten that Armstrong et al could step where they stepped only because of the sacrifices made by Space Mouse and others.
There is, if you look well, a certain dignity as well as cheesiness about Space Mouse, befitting the occasion as well as his favorite food.
You’ll discover, if you let your eyes relax so that you see rather than look, that Space Mouse is constructed as a three dimensional space – that is, in terms of our perceptional interpretation – and that this interpretation may offer you various special arrangements of the planes that make up the image.
Space Mouse is the first of a series of oil paintings I started in 2014. To date, five year later, the number is at 60 with some under construction.
Finally, it is good to know that Space Mouse, like all my oil painting, is constructed using the excellent paint manufactured by the Oud Holland Verven Fabriek (the Old Holland Paint Factory) at Driebergen, Netherlands.
Space Mouse (2016, 40 x 50 cm, oils) is a homage to the first mouse - and through it to all other animals including homo sapiens itself - experimentally launched into thin air or less during the spacecraft race that dominated USA and USSR space technologies as of the sixties. Let it not be forgotten that Armstrong et al could step where they stepped only because of the sacrifices made by Space Mouse and others.
There is, if you look well, a certain dignity as well as cheesiness about Space Mouse, befitting the occasion as well as his favorite food.
You’ll discover, if you let your eyes relax so that you see rather than look, that Space Mouse is constructed as a three dimensional space – that is, in terms of our perceptional interpretation – and that this interpretation may offer you various special arrangements of the planes that make up the image.
Space Mouse is the first of a series of oil paintings I started in 2014. To date, five year later, the number is at 60 with some under construction.
Finally, it is good to know that Space Mouse, like all my oil painting, is constructed using the excellent paint manufactured by the Oud Holland Verven Fabriek (the Old Holland Paint Factory) at Driebergen, Netherlands.
