ARTIST STATEMENT
EXHIBITION HISTORY
GALLERIES
MY FAVORITES


Artist Statement -



Registration Netherlands Institute for Art History RKD 473520

Painter and graphic artist, fiction writer. Graduated at University of Amsterdam. Quit work as journalist at a national newspaper in 2000 to become fulltime painter and writer. Initially watercolor, linocut and monotype of etching ground on glass. Changed to digital raster painting in 2004. Proceeded through a combination of raster-vector to vector around 2013. Lorenzo Award for digital painting at the 2015 Florence Biennale, several other awards. Author of Digital painting explained and illustrated 2013-2022, an online source of information on digital painting at www.digitalpainting.be Author if Digital Painting Auteursdomein, Amsterdam 2021.

Computer
My love for the computer comes through my partner, a theoretical computer scientist at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, one of the founding institutions of the Internet. At the end of the 1970s, we had a computer terminal at home and communicated via Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet. In 1984 I bought a NEC TRS 80, one of the first notebook-style computers. It had an awesome 32KB memory, an eight-line display and a music cassette tape as external memory.

Raster
In 2000 I gave up my journalistic work to devote myself to writing and illustrating fiction, mainly in watercolor and linocuts. In 2004 I had a computer with a drawing program for the first time, a Palm TX with a stylo and touchscreen. The entire toolbox consisted of a black pencil with one square tip in three sizes and an eraser. By 2010, I was using the iPad with Brushes, a popular raster painting program. In a 2012 software update, Brushes without prior warning removed its feature to enlarge paintings. Enlarging was indispensable in order to print, exhibit or sell raster paintings. An entire generation of digital painters was expelled from Brushes and had to learn to work with other software, a silent exodus at a time when Hockneys enlargements of Brushes paintings attracted worldwide interest. I focused on vector, a medium that originated in the automotive industry and is still mainly popular in advertising. It appealed to me that vector paintings can be enlarged indefinitely without loss of quality.

Vector
After years of raster painting I found it difficult to deal with vector. Sharp transitions, smooth forms, monochrome colors and perfect gradients strongly limit its emotional palette. ‘Ceci est un oeuf’ 2015 expresses my initial dislike. However, the forms you could make and the way they are constructed fascinated me. It seemed to offer a new language of form while leaving the artist in charge. Ten years later I still think that vector is the ideal collaboration between artist and computer. On one side there is digital raster painting, where the artist is fully in charge but there is no real difference with traditional painting. On the other, computer-generated painting offers renewal but the computer takes the lead. Its perfect forms, regularity and repetitiveness, and the absence of the artists personal brand of clumsiness, feel lifeless to me.

To overcome my dislike of vector I searched for ways that could lend it some of the soft nuance and broader range of expression of raster. After many failed experiments I more or less succeeded by discarding the flat monochrome colors altogether and using only black white gradients, supplemented with red. Subsequently, five Isolated Moments in grayscale supplemented with larger color areas made me feel more at ease with the medium.

Fractals
Still trying to escape the flatness I tried Mandelbrot and L-systems fractal forms as a background and to combine vector with photos. These were raster works or combinations of vector and raster. The hands off procedure to generate fractals vexed me, and raster brought back the old enlargement problem. Three still lifes with flowers and a portrait of my cat survive this failure. More and more I missed the simple clarity of pure vector that had troubled me so much in the past. In Particles, simple vector forms are placed against soft backgrounds without the need to restrict colors any longer.

Today I use the computer to shape perfectly regular vector forms, and contrast them with the irregularity and imperfection of my living hand. Imperfection is necessary, a sign of life. For me, art is not in the first place a pleasant image to look at, or an ingenuous digital toy, but the reflection of a thinking and feeling human being, shaped by the events in his or her life. I think it is important that the computer does not have a guiding role in the creative process and that the one-way direction from maker to image is preserved.

Contrasts balance
My work is about things of a different nature, coexisting without being weakened or outflanked by each other, striking a harmony.

httpsvandevenportfolio.blogspot.com

Artist Exhibitions



Events
- Directors choice at the annual competition award for digital painting, Museum of Computer Art MOCA NY in 2018
- Lorenzo Award for digital painting at the Florence Biennale in 2015
- Annual competition award for digital painting, Museum of Computer Art MOCA NY in 2014
- Annual competition award for digital painting, Museum of Computer Art MOCA NY in 2015.

Exhibitions
- Next 2019 October 11-13 Annual Dutch Art Fair ADAF, Amsterdam
- 2016 March 1-15 Scheltema, Rokin 9 Amsterdam
-2015 October 17-25, Florence Biennale, Italy
-2014 May 30-June 5, contemporary digital painting, Studio k16, Amsterdam, Netherlands
-2012 November 27 - December 8, International contemporary art, Onishi Gallery, New York, USA
-2011 September 10-25, Saatchi-Camaver Kunsthaus, Contemporary art exhibition, Villa Tittoni Traversi, Desio Milano, Italy.
-2009 March 14-28, Opera Gallery, Budapest, Dutch contemporary artists
httpwww.saatchi-gallery.co.ukdealers_galleriesGallery
-2007 Waanders, Zwolle prentkunst...

Artist Publications



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Artist Collections



Letterkundig museum Den Haag (NL); private collections in Arlington(USA), Stanford (UK), Tokio, London, Rotterdam, Moscow, Budapest, Vergnolles (Fr.) ...

Artist Favorites



 , , , Original Digital Painting, size_width{Waiting_digital_vector-1648859344.jpg} X
Original , 2018
120 x 180 cm (47.2 x 70.9)
 , , , Original Digital Painting, size_width{Waiting_digital_vector-1648859344.jpg} X
Original , 2018
120 x 180 cm (47.2 x 70.9)
 , , , Original Digital Painting, size_width{Waiting_digital_vector-1648859344.jpg} X
Original , 2018
120 x 180 cm (47.2 x 70.9)
 , , , Original Digital Painting, size_width{Waiting_digital_vector-1648859344.jpg} X
Original , 2018
120 x 180 cm (47.2 x 70.9)
Peter Dunckelmann, , , Original Photography Digital, size_width{crazy_windows-1513546874.jpg} X
Original Digital Photograph, 2017
300 x 210 x 1 mm (47.2 x 70.9)
Netherlands
Karin Kuhlmann, , , Original Digital Art, size_width{Abstract_Art_Print_Early_In_The_Morning-1415700630.jpg} X
Original Digital Art, 2003
40 x 30 x 1 inches (47.2 x 70.9)
Netherlands