Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 16, 2023: Arjen a Dutch painter, illustrator (#1985)

As a ten year old child, Arjen started copying paintings of the Old Masters. He studied the techniques of for instance Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruysdael, and was fascinated by the works of Picasso, Dali and Condo. He was also intrigued by the ethnographic art.

As a gifted violin player he studied at the Conservatory of Utrecht. After his Master degree Arjen was asked to become professor at the same institute. Simultaneously Arjen kept painting and sketching while searching for his own unique style. Examples of the results can be seen on this website.

Arjen lives in the countryside of The Netherlands with his wife and four children.

"I decided to go back to basics of the drawing and the possibilities of the line. How to be simple and expressive at the same time. With different elements of the human body and geometric forms I construct whole new entities.

I try to make balanced and minimalistic works. The deformation in Picasso’s work is a great inspiration to me. I started looking for a simplification and reduction of what he did. A simplification in a way like what Mondrian did in his abstract compositions.

The way Picasso deforms and at the same time reorganizes the elements so that the result is a balanced picture, is truly amazing. But where Picasso chose to do this in a cubistic way, I went down another alley and tried to get an image that has volumes and feels like a whole entity, a ‘real’ being.

I work at the intersection of the simple and the absurd. For instance by creating the illusion of body parts that aren’t there, or the possibility that you can interpret one body part as two different ones.

Some works have an underlying message, commenting in a subtle way on the world we live in."

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