Rob van Hoek - Fascinating - layered - mixed media "night landscape" - signed - Sold

• Rob van Hoek lives and works in The Hague, born in 1957

I have been inspired by the landscape for years. And I especially mean cultivated landscape. I can't do much with wild and rough, as beautiful as that can be, in my work. Patterns, lines, rhythm, surfaces, but also fallow, green, frost, mown fields, a row of trees along the road or a lonely tree in a field; the cultural landscape is my greatest source of inspiration. And of course the horizon and the spectacle above, which largely determines the space and atmosphere. I apply about 5 to 6 base layers to the canvas with a brush, in such a way that a beautiful structure of brush strokes is created. It is quite time-consuming, but adds a lot to the painting in terms of atmosphere. The painting itself is done with transparent oil paint in different layers. Instead of applying paint very precisely with a brush, I often work the other way around: I apply a lot of paint and polish and scrape away part of this layer very precisely. This can be done with a brush, but also with a cloth, paper towels, cotton swabs, the back of a brush, or whatever is suitable to get the right lines, shapes or strokes. Under the term “Songlines”, I work from the following concept: All the titles of my paintings are sentences (or parts thereof) from song lyrics. Mostly pop music, but also suitable jazz titles, or whatever. It is incredible how often there is a reference to the landscape, the weather, the time of day, the time of year, etc. These are wonderful titles to work from, or add to a painting afterwards. The term “Songlines” is also a semi-serious reference to the book with that title by Bruce Chatwin, in the Dutch translation “De Gezongen Aarde”.