This is a new painting. Karl was against the idea that I should paint a butterfly in a still life, he thought it would be the essence of kitsch. When he saw the result, though, he thought it was good. What do you think, does the butterfly work here?

Are there some topics in art that are going to be kitsch no matter what, or is it really more a question of how the artist handles the topic?

For me the lesson is that paintings that seem to not work so well may be a few strokes away from something good.

I’ve been doing a lot of painting and now I am preparing a website for the images. Here is one that was photographed today. Comments?

Hanneke can’t post today, so I am going to post about her work instead. Here is a detail from a painting. Can you guess what this is?

Hanneke has diverse talents. She makes both still life paintings and paintings like this one. The question is, what should Hanneke focus on? It’s a question we discuss from time to time. Hanneke paints still life because she loves still life. Ironically, still life, which in some ways is marketable, may be standing in the way of her making art that could get her more recognition. Should Hanneke paint “challenging art“, artworks speaking to terrorism, racism and other -isms of our time? Or is humble still life the real challenging art of our time, something which no serious avant-guard collector or dealer would dare to exhibit?

I’d be curious to hear what you think. Terrorism and social ills are not really Hanneke’s thing, but perhaps she should be practical and make less acceptable paintings. What do you say?

And don’t forget to look at the rest of this image…

This painting of Françesca I made when pregnant with Nino (Fran was one year old then). We were living in Germany and I painted only an hour or two each day because I was too tired to sit longer (I was really big at that point).

It is based on drawings of Françesca sleeping, combined with my imagination. I find it wonderful to paint people.

Before I committed myself to still life painting I was working together with Karl using his rediscovered techniques of the old masters.

That is how I learned to use the different layers of paint in a simple and logical way.

I used to paint from my imagination, now I seem to have left that behind. How do you balance between reality and fantasy in your work?

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Here are some technical details about the painting.

Important to me in working with Karl was that I learned how to make a drawing and bring it on to an oak panel with a gesso made from rabbit skin glue and chalk.

On that you needed to draw for days and days and than also work on it with ink and a brush and still make changes.

When the drawing finally was finished the panel was ready for the underpainting. And that is as I already said a simple and logical process:

first the sky that was under-painted with azurite , white and ochre,

• than the earth : under-painted with (a reddish color )
• then the foliage : also a reddish under-painting
• the skin color as close to the skin color as posible but a little warmer?
• the cloth covering the baby I first under-painted it pink because I thought I wanted it to be over-painted with lapis lazuli
• the under-painting of the left flower was blue with azurite the other one ocre.

Thus the process of under-painting was finished.

Karl and I where always surprised about the simple beauty of this stage.

Then the over-painting started:

• the sky with lapis lazuli , white

the earth and foliage with verdigris, the cloth with lapis lazuli, later I made it white and gray

• The skin I painted with a color that had the copy zinnober red
• And the flower with lac lake, a homemade pigment.

drawing by Françesca at age 3

I wanted to do a post about the drawings that my children made. I have an incredible amount of them (drawings, that is, plus five kids). The first thing was to choose and scan and crop and choose and scan and crop.

I chose drawings that use pen (as well as pencil) because I am always so moved by the expressive output of such a simple medium. I like the sharp lines — like in etchings. I like the blue color. I am amazed about the sensitivity in the lines, especially when you look from close up. Then I gathered some drawings from different children, and scanned them and cropped them. Then something else came to my mind. How they change in time as the children grow older? Which age do you like best? Which drawing?

drawing by Olivier at age 7 (now he’s 18)

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drawing by Sarita at age 10 (now she’s 20)

I tend to prefer the artwork by youngest for the beauty of the lines, but the middle one I find moving because of the expression — it’s parts of a series of portraits. What do you think of the last portrait? Interesting that she made the skin color with pen as well.
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Note to Parents Children’s art is an appropriate subject for Art & Perception, but not all subject matter on Art & Perception will be suitable for children. The children’s content from this blog, plus other artwork by children, appears on a blog devoted to kids called Child and Art.

This is what I call my “Queens day” picture. It is of a very old cup that was given out when a Dutch princess was born, and of a pastry desert that you can only buy on the queen’s birthday. I wanted to do something with this very old cup and this thing you can eat on this special day because I found it such a challenging combination. Also, a painting in which the color orange is the head character is a challenge because it is not an easy color to paint with, and maybe not an easy color to look at. The House of Orange is the Dutch royal family.

This picture is not about primary colors, I think.

There are more interesting painting challenges in this picture. For example, mother of pearl in the handle of the spoon and fork. Here is a 640 KB version of the image if you would like to take a closer look.

What do you think about the composition? Could it be improved by cropping, or is it about right?