‘My use of colors is not completely natural, because the colors appear because of my experience and my interpretation of the motif. I am searching for rhytmical compositions, and so I reach almost abstract compositions.  But I keep the landscape as my living motif...’

 

Expositions:
download exposition list (pdf)

 

Website:
paulwerner.exto.org

 

Paul Werner

A figurative artist
Despite all his visual freedom Paul Werner as a painter is very loyal and faithful in representing the motives he chose to represent in his art. It is because he feels closely connected to the motives he loves, that he paints. He keeps observing and watching, discovering and exploiting the typical forms of the rocks, the trees, the shore or the landscapes he sees before him. So, Werner is definitely a figurative painter, but he frequently meets abstract dimensions, because of the borders he is exploring in his figurative representation. This is his necessary consequence of using all the freedom he can mobilize while portraying the landscape before him, his own garden or just a lonely tree reflecting its branches in the lake. He never departs from his chosen motive for the attraction of completely abstract painting.

As young artist
How to find your own style as young artist in the midst of Amsterdam’s experimenting artistic world during the 1960’s? It was quite a task, especially when your own artistic style appears to be totally un-modern, and just a solid expressionist and figurative style. This was the problem faced by Paul Werner around 1950. He moved then to Amsterdam to find a job to earn a living and also pay for his own education in paining. Art had always been part of his childhood, his father was an oil painter in his free time, and he had an uncle who collected contemporary paintings from artists around him, in exchange for food or drink. He also had another uncle who wandered round Holland and Belgium drawing and sketching.

 

Painting the landscape
As early as 1957 Paul Werner became strongly fascinated by the wild landscapes and the rocky coast of Brittany in Franc. He would return to his beloved seascapes many times, and frequently painted his gouaches on paper on the spot, on the wild coasts with the wind, tangy smell and sea around him. The weird rocks in the water with all their figurative suggestions would be portrayed by Werner in a style of painting growing more and more free over the next 40 years. More and more he succeeded in painting the solid, heavy rocks as spatial open forms, which you can enter as a spectator with your eyes.

His Influence
It was, and still is this characteristic of painting by Paul Werner – very impulsive and full of free associations and little nervous movements on the paper – which created his personal visual freedom. It followed from the tradition of expressionism, but a kind of expressionism loaded with energy and, with images so transparent and open that Paul Werner inspired some younger abstract painters around him, such as Fons Heijnsbroek.