Maartje Frenken • PIET HEIN EEK

Description

Maartje Frenken (st-Michielsgestel 1961):

“The connection with the beautiful, all-encompassing nature, the light, the flowers and plants is what fascinates me. I stand in the light and look closely at the plants and flowers, I squat and see the white, pink and yellow flowers in the backlight. The flowers speak for themselves in all their universal fragility.

My work is dreamy, playful and involved with all that blooms and grows and eventually withers and decays. I capture this with oil paint in muted colours, flowing and transparent, delicate and rarefied. Thinly painted, if not skimpy in material use. The skin of the canvas dimly shimmers through it. I am a sober colourist, like the symbolist Odilon Redon, with whom my work has associations. I like to speak through my paintings about emotions and concentration about what is of real value.”

Portrait: Ruud Balk