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Below are several reviews of my work:
0)Maria Lluisa Borras in the Diari di Girona
1) Sister Wendy Beckett at the Morley Gallery.
2) A review of the "Enfant terrible show at the LCP gallery in London
3) Clem Greenberg, New York art critic
4) Clara Gari for the "Enfant Terrible 2" exhibition in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain in 2004
0)ARTISTS FROM THE EMPORDA
"The feeling of flower leaves"
“El sentiment a flor de pell”
Text: Maria Borras, Dominical, Newspaper of Girona, 4 January 2009
Bé van der Heide was born in Eastern Holland and studied four years in the academy of fine art at Enschede. During the Second World War, the family lived in the countryside, in different farmhouses, and the painter learned to love the life away from the city. She says that today she could not live far from the Empordà any more, where her two daughters and their respective families live.
Her professional life started in 1963 with an exposition in the Rijks Museum of Enschede, but next, on meeting Hans Diemel, who would be forever her partner, she went with him to Canada where she continued her studies of art and practiced especially graphical work in the stimulating atmosphere of the Graff workshop
in Montreal.
In 1964, she travels during a year to Europe, Asia and Africa, Upon return, she explores the possibilities of experimental art: in 1966 she presents in Toronto “Les Píntures Gastronòmíques” and in 1979, in Montreal an exhibition about the foot, which is not only the part of the body that connects us with the earth, but that part of us that remains furthest from the heart. The exhibition flyer announced that every Thursday the artist would wash the feet of the visitors.
In Canada, where she stayed for sixteen years, she made one exhibition after another, including during a period of three years that she spent in Istanbul, where she exhibited in the German Cultural Center.
She is also interested in the techniques of mosaic and she carried out a series of abstract murals that made her win fame: already in 1967 she was commissioned to execute a very large mural for the Dutch Pavilion at Expo‘67 in Montreal.
HOUSE IN LONDON
After that period of journeys, in 1982, the couple settled down and took up residence in London and soon the painter works in the Space Studio in Berry Street. Since 1999 she spends her time between London and Mas Poch in Vilaritg.
Every year, at the end of the summer, she has a large exhibition of her work in the gallery that has been installed in the old stables of Mas Poch. The opening of the exhibition is on the day of Sant Martí, the patron Saint of Vilaritg, which is celebrated with a village fiesta. Surprisingly, I have ascertained that she has more visitors here than when she opens an exhibition at her gallery in London.
She always paints in series, inspired by living things, facts or reflections about which she develops a specific theme or idea, and she writes: «I work, starting from a personal search for the truth, about the identity of the person, about life, in a kind of visual meditation».
At the eighties she makes big abstract paintings that seem to portray fantastic tunnels excavated in the earth and unknown, hidden worlds. If >she always had an extraordinary facility for drawing, she is now also revealed as a great colorist. She works in series always leaving themselves to take away for>because of>from>out of the feelings.
She explains to me that the Series "Insects" originated during a stay at a Dutch beach in the winter of 1992. On the beach there were few people, all very old. In that sad and melancholic environment she noticed a dead seagull on the sand; she could not sort out the eyes and she painted it once and again, the same one but always different: from that seagull was born one of the most extensive and varied series that she ever made, the sèrie "Insectes".
In 2002, she makes another large series evoking the thirties that she titled «Enfant Terrible», and this summer, I have seen exposed in Mas Poch the last one of her series, «Collapse», inspired by some photos of the destruction of the city of Dresden during Worldwar II that she saw in the newspaper and in which she symbolizes the disaster that any war means for a city.
Bé van der Heide is a woman who always has a smile on her lips, is cosy, affectionate, full of imagination and extremely sensitive. I cannot imagine a better personification of the joie of vivre that Matisse possessed, than this painter, who seems to feel herself, amongst us, as one more Empordanesa.
Hans Diemel translation, 25 Jan 2009
1) Sister Wendy Beckett, the English Carmelite nun who has become well known following her acclaimed TV series on major art in the musea of the world, has this to say about my work:
"Some art is easy: one good look and we know what we think of it, whether for good or bad. But other art can be tantalizingly subtle, and it takes much looking, much time and much attention, before we realize what is before us.
Bé van der Heide is the second and more profound type of artist. Her work is never easy, even when, formally, it is simple.
But the longer we stand before it, the more rewarded we find ourselves.
What is the reward? It is partly, of course, pleasure: these are the most beautiful images. Yet theirs is an almost ethereal beauty, for all their earthiness.
What are we to make of an artist who – despite a radiantly colourful beginning to her career, (she understands colour and can use it full tilt and with passion!) – now paints with ‘acrylic, charcoal, coffee dregs’ or with ‘Chinese ink’?
It is not that she has eschewed colour. Look at a work like ‘Untitled Landscape', with its dark smutty cairn on the left and blotchy whites on the right, and see the exquisite pallours with which van der Heide has made the background luminous. Her ‘Bumble Bee’ is a yielding curve of the softest hues, stretched out against a dazzle of white and grey.
Van der Heide is still a superb colourist, but it is the colour of the spirit now, not of the flesh.
Hers is an art of great amplitude. Of large-hearted and great-spirited forms that she places with unerring rightness. Her ‘Adam and Eve’ nudes in seas of flesh, but slight with inwardness, after the Fall and all too aware of it, extend with under-stated magnificence over their territory. They are brave creatures, poignant and uncowed. Van der Heide’s reaction to the body, especially the hefty and mature body, is both witty and reverent, ‘Woman stretching’ is a masterpiece. She has an instinctive understanding of body language, and every gesture tells.
We are rather short in our age of major painters, though they are there for the finding.
Sister Wendy Beckett, Quidenham, Oct ‘97
Note: some of the works described are on the site, others have been sold. Be.
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2) A review of the Enfant Terrible series at the LCP in London in 2002
‘Enfant Terrible’
Works on paper by Be Van der Heide
The London Centre for Psychotherapy is lucky to have the opportunity to exhibit the latest work of this internationally well known artist.
Van der Heide works with themes, such as ‘Insects’ or ‘Webs’; she is inspired by objects she finds on the beach or in a box or in her coffee cup dregs. Her studio reflects her style. There are paintings everywhere and their immediate effect was to draw me into her world, where I both felt moved and disconcerted. Using acrylics, inks and colour stains on heavy , sometimes handmade paper and fabric, the work is mainly monochrome but
richly and subtly textured. It is clearly from within, and daringly challenges the viewer to enter and experience her experience. These are strong images that evoke strong feelings.
This most recent series, ‘Enfant Terrible’ is based on a family album. Her sister called her this name but she has no idea why. ‘I am surprised that these figurative paintings - are coming out of me’, she told me. The brooding self portraits, the images of her family in singles, pairs and groups of three, draw the viewer evocatively into the painters’ powerfully drawn family relationships of her childhood world. As a small child Van der Heide’s family home was taken over by the Germans for their headquarters. She movingly showed me a bullet damaged book from her bedroom as evidence of bombings that were to follow. Although she is stoical about her upbringing, she says that the photographs show her as a ‘deprived’ little girl, ‘looking a mess’.
This exhibition is about the memories aroused by that album, the drawings expressing the ambivalent condition of childhood: vulnerable and powerful; expectant and frustrated. Is the little girl -self conscious in her tight orange dress and ungroomed hair- victim, protegee, or both, of the older sister? The scale of the large self portrait with the red bow evokes both the wonder and the power of the child who seems to be gazing expectantly into the future? The future that we as the audience, looking back, now inhabit together with the artist. Virtuous, knowing, vulnerable, confident: the innocent face with the wicked bow; it may well have been this strangely familiar expression of both doubt and certainty that inspired her sister to dub her the ‘enfant terrible’.
Be Van der Heide’s work will be on view until September.
Doula Nicolson, Faye Carey
Art Sub-Committee, LCP April 02
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3) Art critic Clem Greenberg told me at the Triangle workshop in New York in 1984:
"If you paint like that, you are a damn good artist"
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4) Clara Gari in the calalog printed on the occasion of the opening of the "Enfant terrible 2 exhibition in Figueres, Spain, 2004
A “Terrible” Neighbour
The first time that I saw the work of Bé van der Heide, was at her home in Cistella. With much care, the paintings were hung in the gallery as well as lying about in her studio, full of light.
It was at the end of the evening on a day when the tramuntana blew, which caused a certain movement of the leaves on the olive trees and made them shimmer like silver. The whole environment, with the newly planted grape and fruit trees, the beloved house, a smiling Bé, with her red unkempt hair, gives a glimpse of the child that is still there, hidden behind the courageous and radical woman.
In this way, some short moments, seem to last a lifetime; because they make us understand the world in another way and in this sense, endure. Such revelations almost always are linked to other people, especially to people who have decided to keep the reins in their own hands and to make their own way. That morning in Cistella was a present from Bé and her husband, thanks to Bé and her paintings.
Bé has travelled widely, has lived in many places, and now has her home, with her husband, close to us. And, in her paintings, we can see what a “Terrible” neighbour we now have. “Terrible”, as in “Enfant Terrible”, which is what her sister called her when she was little.
Bé herself, when she speaks about it, is not sure whether she remembers that time with happiness or nostalgia, such as happens with people who have changed environment often and whom have lived a lot. “Terrible”, in the best sense of the word, because Bé van der Heide has been able to preserve, across all her travels and changes in her life, the freshness, the intimacy, the tenderness and especially the free spirit
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