‘2008: Creating art is a form of alchemy, meaning that what you create must have en effect on yourself as artist. Therefore, it is necessary that the painting goes beyond the personal or at least coincides with it/me; as if clarifying something that drives me further.’

 

Expositions:
download exposition list (pdf)

 

A collector view:

Hans Cohen about Fons Heinsbroek >>

 

Website:
heijnsbroek.exto.org

 

Quotes of Fons Heijnsbroek

2008: This is the vulnerability of purely abstract art; (and therefore, my own vulnerability as well): how do you maintain you expression and all it’s vitality? The life-force of the earthly is lacking if you decide to no longer portray the world. I keep being confronted by this question, before now in my fear and feeling that purely abstract art is actually deathly. Recently, the question is posed differently: what is the living well of expression? Where does the power and drive come from? And especially: how can the vital aspect of this be maintained during the painting process itself?

 

2008: The painting I produce is always larger than myself, because things outside myself are included. But after that there is the necessity to define this larger, wider presence in my painting. With me, this takes place directly during the process of creation, through a vague premonition that ‘something’ is going on, something is happening. I can try to contain this by not painting it out, and thus keep this ‘sound’ from destruction.

 

2008: In this modern age it’s fascinating that we can look inside the body or into the depths of the ocean, this gives us different visual images of organic matter. I have to be careful to watch out that I recognize this in my own paintings.

 

2008: (Fragment from a letter): What would enable me to look at the unexpected, the new? There is something that takes my breath away when I look at something that toushes the edge of my memory. That can happen with daily images of the city, and the same thing happened Herman, when I saw your canvases this summer. It took my breath away because, in some way or other, I experience and actually know nellcor99@gmail.comthat there was a visual breakthrough in me. I often had the same experience looking at paintings by Soutine and Willem de Kooning’s work in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Not with all of them, but there were a couple of de Kooning’s paintings that caused me a feeling of revulsion, yet I kept going back to look at them, (that’s the advatage of a museum that honours its permanent collection),and then I spent ages with my eyes just caught up in these paintings. Then, suddenly that moment would come, my breath would be knocked out of me and immediately afterwards something hit me. Like being struck by lightning.

 

2008: In a number of his water lily paintings, Monet separates the colours radically. If you really get up close, the colours are so far apart that they almost lose their bond. The mutual bond is not strong enough. This is a totally different way of working with colour than say Matisse/Picasso. They were searching for an answer to the problem of how to integrate coloured areas without them becoming too independent. The subtlety of the line and surround were crucial to this. But not for Monet. He had to make the effort the other way round, by forcing all the lines and strokes into one area, something he thankfully rarely achieved. I don’t mean the opposition of impressionism-expressionism; here I mean the question of how colour exists and should be place in life.

 

2008: That which is unformed does not yet exist in life, because it has to first find a form that is functional in life. I don’t think the idea is for a form to just float about. A form has to be active, it evokes something. People look at our paintings and something should happen to them. That is where I can mean something as an artist. I can offer something new and hope that someone picks it up. That must be my responsibility: What have I to offer? I stand on the border of ‘nothingness’ and all existing forms in the painting. I am the one who decides on a form and whether or not it can work.