Peter Bol - etching - Take up your bedcover

Peter Bol (1947) is a painter who still looks at the world with 'innocent eyes'. One who paints from a sincere happiness in life. And does not seem to be affected by the existential doubts of our time. That is Peter Bol. Son of the famous painter Kees Bol, he is taken outside to paint from an early age. While Kees practices depicting the landscape, little Peter learns the art of loitering. A serious way of daydreaming. The surroundings are playfully observed for a long time and attentively. In this way he sees the strange light of a paradise forgotten by adults coming over nature. The world of silent delight that exists outside of time.

Later, as an adult painter, after years of struggle to find his own way in painting, Peter will go in search of this forgotten paradise. Where the contradictions are not seen, where there is beauty. Without having to pay attention to all that is ugly. To an experience of the unity of things, as the most natural order. This is how you end up alone as a painter. For the loner that Peter Bol has become, the pleasure of painting lies in deepening this same painting. The pleasure of seeing things with the eye and correcting them in the mind as soon as he paints them. Then things are seen as taken away from the moment. To become part of an eternity that frees them from all chance.

Imagine standing next to Peter Bol. In the landscape, or better yet, in the middle of nature. You look at the same thing but do not see the same thing. Where you stand opposite nature, he stands in the middle of it. Is he absorbed by what he sees. To become part of it for the duration of the painting. The outside world settles in the inner world of the painter. He finds the colours he needs, the intense and accurate visual language that is his own. The spontaneity, the rhythm and the mobility. Everything to give his subject that essence and that physical experience that are the most expressive. Where strength and fragile tenderness go together, you stand face to face with the nature of Peter Bol. For a painting that in time goes beyond the madness of the day. For paintings that ask to be looked at carefully and for a long time.

To discover, after all the innovation, what remains and is not lost: real painting.