“Art is hidden in nature,
whoever can draw it out into the open gets hold of it.”
Albrecht Dürer
These words by Dürer are a guide in my work and life.
Not only does it apply to nature, that becomes perceptible as an object world around us, but also, in so far as we are nature ourselves, to our physical and intelligent existence.
Inside us nature makes itself known as the proper, particular disposition and specific talent.
This quality determines the kind of attention we have for that object world, by means of which a world of ideas and feelings opens up.
The struggle of the artist is to come to a distinct form of experience that in its turn expresses itself in a specific artistic ability.
The course of development of vision, originality and ability to express is determined by an ongoing self-education and training, in all aspects of the artists life.
In that, all lower impulses become subservient to the higher ones and are absorbed by them!
“Art is hidden in nature.”
The painted or drawn image is not so much carried by external characteristics, as by internal implications, that are a consequence of that growing awareness.
The possibility to affect and communicate in art: to set the spectator in motion internally and thereby to incite him or her to self-experience, lies not in the driven desire of the producer to announce himself, in the will to affect others or in the lust of the designing.
That possibility lies in the artists ability to create from the source of life that he has been able to tap from and to which he has been able to give an authentic visual form!
“whoever can draw it out into the open gets hold of it!”
Jan Wessendorp (translation: Hermien van der Heide)