Ramon van de Werken (1948)

painter, draftsman, graphic artist, sculptor

1970-1971 Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam 1979-1996 Lecturer at the AKI art academy, Enschede 1979 Foundation of the Kalamiteit Publishers, Dokkum 1981 Foundation of the artists' initiative Kalamity Foundation, Dokkum 1995-1998 Member of the provincial advisory committee for visual arts Friesland

Ramon of the Works

Ramon van de Werken (1948) briefly attended the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in the early 1970s, but he soon decided to find his own way. To break free from overly romantic ideas about artistry and to "accept his own time", he looked around and painted basically everything that came to his mind: houses, interiors, gardens, relatives, friends, pets. Some subjects stood out and were sometimes worked out to the extreme. For example, he made dozens of colorful (one reviewer called it 'balorige') still lifes with flowers in all kinds of vases and in combination with ever-changing ashtrays or comparable consumer or decorative items, for which the Wehkamp catalog could literally and figuratively be a source of inspiration. In addition, other clusters of works arose, such as paintings for which he took his own painting and carpentry tools as subjects; some of the paintings he made were three-dimensional, painted on a jigsaw surface. Almost all the work radiated a cheerful energy that also seems to characterize his other projects. In 1981 he was co-founder of the Kalamiteit Foundation, a printing/publishing company for artists in Dokkum that has since been expanded with several workshops where artists can go for the implementation of various types of projects, and behind which Van de Werken is still the driving force. is - sometimes against will and thanks, but with undiminished idealism. In 1977 he painted the forest for the first time. Initially it was a view of a forest edge near his house in Driesum in Friesland, a green facade that he painted dozens of times to fill the screen, always in the middle of summer, never in any other season. It was clear that this subject meant more to him than, say, the still lifes (which he stopped doing after a number of years) and related works, and over the years the forest would become the main theme, bringing together some of his interests. . In 1975 he had bought a hectare near Driesum where he planted all kinds of trees and that has now fully grown. The forest was no longer just a picturesque occasion for him to paint, but it also aroused more and more interest in the scientific sides of things such as growth processes, photosynthesis and synergy. Van de Werken's interest in matters such as photosynthesis, in other words in the effect of sunlight in chlorophyll - a condition for the growth of trees and plants - led to his experimenting with drawing in the early 1980s to see whether he could also see similar growth processes in was able to realize his visual work. In a sense, he's still working on that experiment, and his paintings, spatial work, and computer experiments can all be seen as part of that big project. Those first drawings were sketches for which he devised rules and criteria, half consciously and half intuitively. The starting point was to find a pattern, a system, which corresponds as much as possible to the growth of the leaves of a tree: all leaves grow from the same principle, but no two become exactly alike; no tree or leaf is completely symmetrical, but there is always balance; the sight of a tree, or of a natural landscape, usually gives man an aesthetic pleasure. In order to find a comparable system, he proceeded as follows when drawing in his studio. First a short line is put on paper and a second line is placed against it, but may not cross the first so that there is never an intersection but always a three-fork. The angle at which the lines meet may not be too small, but how large or small it can be is determined experimentally: when is it still beautiful? where does the image clog or tangle with itself? and so on. The paintings he made based on the most successful sketches look like puzzles where no two pieces are identical. The 'puzzle pieces', usually pointed octagons or octagons, do not lie flat next to each other but are tilted criss-cross, creating a spatial image with a complicated play of light and shadow. Like a dense canopy, but artificial - or artistic. However, Van de Werken does not use just one method, but sometimes takes long detours to make a painting. In this way, four large paintings were created because he first selected a drawing for each, executed a spatial work in concrete on the basis of this drawing, photographed it and finally used enlargements of it as a background for painting. He also uses the computer to determine the correct light and shadow effect. Recently, after a long toil, he completed a computer program that can run as a screen saver for twelve consecutive hours and in which a still image can be seen, a 'painting' of the forest that gradually emerges from the darkness and later disappears again, illuminated by the slowly rising and setting 'sun', complete with the most realistic possible gliding of shadows, varying color intensities and the song of birds. The shapes in Van de Werken's paintings that hang in the picture like large leaves or whirl downwards are not always reminiscent of puzzle pieces and can take all kinds of shapes. Recently, more and more realistic painted fragments have appeared (usually in 'grisaille' - but with a color instead of grey), such as, for example, an ornamental leaf or floral motif of a piece of jewelry or utensils. The colors and shapes of the 'leaves' rarely seem natural, but fragments of tree trunks and branches can usually be discerned in the twilight space in the background, reminding us that we are still dealing with a forest. Van de Werken says that he prefers the forest at the end of July, when the leaves are at their fullest and darkest green; and just as full, just as heavy you would almost say - in spite of the light-heartedness and optimism with which they originated - is the atmosphere in many of his paintings. In addition to all these 'experiments' and this fullness, there is also a great deal of variation in the way in which the paint is applied to the canvas, in the handwriting: there can be major differences between the way in which the background and the 'leaves' are created, just like between the 'leaves' - unity in 'style' seems to be the last thing Van de Werken strives for. In short, he pulls out a lot of registers at the same time to get a great richness in the image, but also to achieve a balance between planning and intuition, between nature (or life) and art, and between art and science - all this preferably realized. in one “heroic” process, in which everything falls into place and everything is just right. Using the researcher's method, he dissects not only his subject, the forest, but again and again his own way of making art; and with the freedom of the artist, he reassembles all the fragments he has found into images never seen before. (Ruud Schenk 1998)