Any St.Martin Rieux (1)

I just returned from a great week, drawing and painting in Any-St. Martin-Rieux, a small village in France, just south of the Belgian border.

We did several assignments, initiated by the artist Annemiek Jongen, who organized the week. All together our group consisted out of 12 painters. 

Great scenery, perfect warm weather, plein-air painting during the day, superb French food for dinner, great company in the evening, and don't forget the abundant amounts of white wine: making art doesn't get better than this. 

Le Corbusier in Ronchamp

 

Two real quick sketches that I made in France. This is the famous "Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut" in Ronchamps, by Le Corbusier. I managed to squeeze a visit to this iconic landmark in between the sketching week.

Unfortunately the front (the other side of the building than shown here) was in scaffolding, as were the famous tainted glass windows. But when I made the interior sketch, the few remaining nuns came in (yes it's still a monastery) and sang hymns and flayed a flute. THat was really special.

Jan Siebelink

  

Unfortunately, due to Corona, live model drawing is not possible anymore. I am doing a course with Annemiek Jongen again, on portrait drawing. These are the first excercises: charcoal drawings

Vogelzang in Puth

Vogelzang ("singing birds") in Puth, a small village near where I live. I went there to draw the old farmhouse, but by chance chatted with the lady of the house, Marietje van der Linden. She is an sculpture artist (or rather jewelry designer), but her house is full of works by her husband, son and daughter in law. I saw fantsatic works, big and small. And was allowed to draw the inner courtyard, feauturing some of her stuff.

Germaïn, portrait

Portrait session, last saturday. Germaïn, a model we had a few times before.
Great guy to paint, so different than the usual models.
On Bamboo paper, 50x70cm, acrylics, about 2 hours work.

Steamship SS Kunz

A fantasy drawing of a steamship. These ships always remind me of "the heart of Darkness" .
I made this drawing using chinese ink and wooden cocktail sticks. And a newly aquired Schminke watercolourset. Just for fun.

Kiah Kiean

I have always been a great fan of the Urban Sketcher Kiah Kiean, and how he does his chinese ink & wooden twigs work. I have experimented a lot with twigs, especially bamboo, with mixed results.
On Youtube I found this video how he sketched a Chicago scene during last year symposium, some overhead metro track.
So I tried out the same scene, and used a few of his tricks (as far as I can tell from the video of course). That is, putting the ink in a small jar, with some bandage gauze. And cutting the bamboo stick fresh.
To be honest, I tried these things before with mixed results, the ink never came out as grey as I wanted. So today I tried putting the bamboo in water first, so the wood is soaked. And voilà, at last I got the result I was looking for.
Not quite what Kiah Kiean can do with this technique, but a promising start.

La Cienega blvd, L.A.

Oilpainting, based on a picture that I took some years ago in Los Angeles.
I already reworked the picture into an urban sketch, which eventually lead to a comic in which sketchers all over the world participated. The sketch is shown below.

I tried to learn from the fantastic work of the L.A. based artist William Wray, who does similar treatment of Urban scenes.
I tried his themes before, without much success, but this is the first time that I am really content with the result.

Gonna do more like this. 

Via Imperiale revisited

Experimenting with drawing with twigs and Indian ink, to achieve a more free style of drawing and painting. Based on a sketch I made earlier this year in Rome. I am not yet satisfied.

Naked Flame

We visited some Mies van der Rohe buildings in our region (he was born 20km away, in Aachen).
Two of his villas (Haus Lange and Esters) ware transformed into a museum for contemporary art. A very nice museum I should add.
In one of the rooms a performance had just started. A work of art by the UK artist Roger Hiorns.
He invites naked young art students to sit on a complicated machine to stare at some flames, which are slowly dying out. The idea sounds easier than it was: it makes you contemplate on our age of technology and the relation of that technology to our naked existence.
Just enough time for a quick sketch.  I talked to the performer later on, a nice guy. He was a photographer and video artist himself.

Firestorm

Firestorm, an impression based on the devastating air raids in World war 2.
I visited an art exhibition in Venlo this weekend. There was work of Jef Diederen on display, and one of his paintings, in red and black, made a huge impression. It reminded me of the old coalmines and cokes furnaces from my youth.
And an exhibition on war and peace, with work of Anselm Kiefer, Ger Lataster and Armando among others. These two impressions came together in this work, where I experimented with red watercolour and chinese ink. Actually this is version 6, the first that I was content with.
In a Moleskine watercolour book A4.

Exhibition on gender preferences

We have a museum called the "Continium" in Kerkrade, some 15 kilometers away.

It's a museum mainly for children. It covers subjects like science, nature, technology, biology, history, that kind of stuff. Essentially: "how does it work".
The exhibits are not aimed at showing objects, but they try to involve the visitors and to make them play with the displays.

This is an exhibit where children are asked to make choices between art objects, music, clothes, books, films etc. The choices are then recorded with the aim to show them about gender differences, and how that involves different tastes and interests. And maybe that preferences are not so gender specific at all. 

Anyway, one of my paintings was chosen for the exhibition: the view on Madison Avenue in New York. The top painting.
I made it back in 2011, based on an unused sketch made during our New York trip in 2009.
 http://www.renefijten.blogspot.nl/2011/02/madison-avenue.html

The exhibition will run for a full year.

Brazil

2 portraits of Brazilian people. Based on pictures from a newspaper (Volkskrant dec 2013).
It was an exercise in monochrome painting, as part of this years Model Master class.
Acrylic on paper, about 50x60cm.

The love letter

The love letter. A painting loosely based on a painting by Vermeer.
I posted an earlier version on this blog some time ago, here is the link:
http://www.renefijten.blogspot.nl/2014/02/stuck-at-vermeer.html
I received some good observations by Beth (from Montreal), which I followed to some extent.
I also posted the painting on another forum (sketching workshop), and even if I did not follow all suggestions, they all made sense somehow. I makes you think, and that's the only way to improve.

The major changes are:
- background: toning down the background and unifying the top with the bottom, getting rid of saturated  red.
- figure: the posture of the maid was unnatural, I made her smaller and repositioned the arm for a more natural look.
- I made the yellow skirt less exuberant and enlarged the letter (the subject of the painting....)
BTW: I observe that the blue lines in this picture come out more saturated than they do in reality, I'ts hard to make good pictures of the paintings I make.

Alphons Winters prize

Exhibition tonight in the Kerkrade townhall.
This painting was made in may 2013, during a live portrait session. Acrylic on paper. Took me about 1 1/2 hour to make.
The painting was selected for the first round of the bi-annual Alphons Winters prize (for amateur painters). It was nice to see selected works of 35 painters together in one room.
I was curious to see how my work compares to others within the league I always wanted to be in. I must say, the average quality was pretty high, and some works were far better than mine. But in general I think I fitted in well.
Only a few works will be selected for the next and final round, but I will have no problem to "lose" from what I saw tonight.

Paint box

Isn't this cute?
I bought this ietsy-pietsy mini watercolour paintbox in Maastricht last saturday. It even has a brush!
For €2,50 only....
The brush is unusable, it's only good to clean an electrical razor. And the paint is horrible. You see immediately that the pigments are very crudely grinded; I will refill them with proper tube colours later.
But still: I can never use the excuse that I didn't bring my colours with me again...

Of course it's so tiny, I'll probably lose it in no time.

Starting 2014 with Wes Douglas

First: best wishes for the new year! May it be a creative one!
How about this surprise when opening my facebook account this morning: Wes Douglas (from Illinois,USA) made this fantastic portrait of me. I had no idea. How cool is this.
And so well made.
You already guessed that's a reference to the comic we are all working on: "no right turn".
I think that hat looks really cool, I'll have to buy one.
Thanks Wes!

Bettery magazine

One of my drawings was used in an article in the online "Bettery Magazine" about recharging the Urban Mind.
They do articles on International Urban living.

The article was about China Miéville, one of my favourite authors. I have reread his "the City and the City" a few times, still amazing.
Here is a link to the article.
http://betterymagazine.com/news/extreme-visions/
(written by Lars Schmeink).
The original drawing from 2011:  http://www.renefijten.blogspot.nl/2011/06/city-city.html

Thomas Schütte exhibition

During our visit to the Folkwang Museum of Modern Art in Essen (Germany), our group happened to be present at an opening of a exhibition of the artist Thomas Schütte.
He makes a lot of huge objects representing abstractions of female bodyforms. Quite good actually.
I settled myself in a corner to make this drawing of one of the objects. At times it was more interesting to observe the public. Unfortunately they moved around constantly, making it hard to draw.

Carceri d'invenzione

Always loved Piranesi's work (1720-1778); I like his drawings even more than his etchings. Especially the "Carceri d'invenzione" series.
So I was thrilled to be able to visit the Piranesi exhibition in London (in the sir John Soane museum). As far as I am concerned, the highlight of the exhibition was a fantastic drawing of an architectural fantasy, consisting only of red chalk lines and brown ink. It inspired me to make this fantasy in the same style. My own carceri d'invenzione.