Artist Profile - Rob Van Hoek
In The Yellow Haze of Sun
Medium: Oil & Wax on Canvas
Measurements: 30 x 30cm Framed
Year: 2017
Price: £400 Plus Delivery
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Biography
During all my years of painting I have been inspired by the landscape, especially the cultivated landscape. Wild, rough and virginal landscapes are beautiful too, but no subject of my paintings.The patterns, lines, rhythms and shapes of (harvested) fields, a line of trees along a road, a solitaire tree in a field, the houses which liven up the countryside; these are a few items that make the cultivated landscape so inspiring to me. And of course the sky above, adding space and atmosphere.
Artist Statement
Perspective is used in a playful way; sometimes flat, sometimes with depth, often both.Painting TechniqueOn the canvas I put at least 5 or 6 layers of white, gesso-like paint. The brush strokes of these layers give a nice structure. Because I use transparent oil paint in several very thin layers, the structure remains visible, adding much atmosphere to the painting.Instead of adding the paint precisely with a brush, I work the other way around; I put on a lot of paint and then I carefully remove some of it, while “drawing” in the wet paint with a brush, the backside of a brush, a cloth, a tissue, a Q-tip or whatever is suitable for making the lines, the forms, the dots etc.The TitlesAll the titles I use are lines (or parts of lines) from song lyrics. Mostly from pop music, sometimes a title of a jazz song. There are so many references to the landscape to be found, (and the sky, the weather, the time of day, the time of year, and so on), which I thankfully use.Usually I give the title to the painting when it is finished, browsing through my collection of songlines and selecting the most appropriate one. But sometimes I make a painting with a particular songline in mind.Working from this concept is a half serious reference to the novel “The Songlines”, by Bruce Chatwin.