| Hendrick Brandtsoen - Short characteristic In the opinion of Hendrick Brandtsoen, a painting should be a mental oasis. Not that he objects to the expression of emotions, but meditation and concentration are likely to contribute to a natural balance in the artist and in the spectator and may help them to cope with the complexities of today's life. In taking this stance, he deliberately distances himself from the moral strait-jackets of many new movements in art which confront the viewer (in the form of designs in which the most personal and the most direct expression is considered the ideal form) with the frustrations and igonizing problems of the artist. These art movements tend to overshoot the mark, i.e. the social justification to which they aspire in their efforts to fullfill the function of mankind's conscience. In spite of completing his artistic training, Hendrick Brandtsoen feels himself to be more a self-made painter, for he has focussed entirely on one specific technical field drawn from his 17th century predecessors. He thinks that the time has come, after many decades of consecutive "-isms" (which may be considered to have superceeded the academism of the nineteenth century), to pick up where we left off and to combine the new insight with traditional craftmanship into some form of expressing comprehensibly those human emotions for which words are not enough. The additional dimension in his still life paintings refers to an every present process of contemplation, through which the ever changing human perspective is assessed and ordered. |