Self-Portrait

This is a self-portrait I am working on at the moment. It is going to be a Portrait symbolising the ending of human beauty/exterior. Our own beautiful vanity slowly crumbling unnoticed due to our ignorance and unwillingness to see the truth that our own race as we know it is ending.

From the eyes of the voyeur the face will be in the top right corner and looking diagonally to the left, so only a little of the left side of the face is visible.


The left side of the face is crumbling and showing cracks. Where the left eye used to be is a hole where you can see the skull coming through. The skull is clean, like one that is been fleshless for a long time. And even though the clean skull with the dark eye socket is in the light the shaded left side of the face, still intact, doesn’t seem to notice. Even in our darkest time we can’t see how close we are to the end, brightly lit and right in front of us.

These are the sketches done for this painting:




These photo’s show the process of the painting:

Vanitas

You probably know what a vanitas painting is. But if you don’t it is a still-life filed with items symbolizing our mortality, vanity and how quickly our beauty fades away. Considering the things these items symbolize are still true I’m showing you this Vanitas I’m painting. Just to remind you that your life will end.

Destruction

This is the start of series of paintings from news paper photographs painted in a crude way lacking details but the ate the same time giving you a clear image and the feeling of destruction and abandonment.

this is the process of the first painting:

Practice makes perfect

If there is one thing that I am doing is that I am learning constantly. Every day new things are stored in my brain and new skills are acquired or refined. The same goes for every living human being walking this blue planet. Almost everything can be learned. I like learning things I don’t know or things I can’t do. So here I am showing you how drawings skills progress just because of the fact that I am living and I am doing it.

Karel

Karel Appel once said about his work: “ik doe maar wat” which, translated to English means: “I am just doing something”. You are probably familiar with his work, if you aren’t you should look it up.
Here I present my reaction to him and his work, “I am doing something”. I am going to paint an apple every day I am in my studio, just to show you and me how skill can improve by practicing the same thing over and over again.
This is about making a conscious choice and practice.

So here I present my Karel series:
































And remember: “am apple a day, keeps the doctor away.”