Margriet de Moor's latest novel is titled 'de schilder en het meisje' (the painter and the girl) referring to Rembrandt and  Elsje Christiaens, a Danish girl executed in Amsterdam of who he made two small drawings.  Margriet de Moor doesn't mention Rembrandt by name in the novel, so I kept the reference low key as well.  I used  Rembrandtesk colours for this watercolour and pencil portrait and put Margriet de Moor in a pose similar to one that Rembrandt used in a drawing of his wife Saskia Uylenburg.

During the seventies Prof Wouter Buikhuisen was under permanent attack, particularly by Piet Grijs (pseudonym of Hugo Brandt Corstius)  in the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland.   It eventually ended his scientific career. Buikhuisen has a continued interest in the workings of the amygdala as a potential source of criminal behavior.  On this picture he locates this important organ in the brain of his nemesis Piet Grijs. Published in Vrij Nederland 4 sept 2010. 

Meindert Fennema

Distortion is not limited to caricatures. Here Meindert Fennema confronts his twisted image of Boris van de Ham with Geert Wilders. A well known trick in the public debate: first distort the views of your opponent and than fight those distorted views. 

NRC Handelsblad 31 Aug 2010

How can one person resemble two very different persons?

I once visited a class mate and was introduced to her mother.  They looked remarkably alike.  Then her father walked in the room and he was her spitting image as well.  This was weird, because her father and mother didn't resemble one another at all! So from C looks like A and C looks like B, it does not necessarily follow that A looks like B.

Apparently it is possible that the determining features for one face sit e.g in the mouth and eyes and for another e.g in the eyebrows and nose.  A third face can then combine all of these features and look like both (see illustration).  When making portraits it is important to look for such determining features.

JB Charles / Willem Nagel

A biography has been published about Willem Nagel (1910 - 1983, pseudonym JB Charles).  For this man of  many talents, activities and identities, the war never ended. I tried to capture that in the atmosphere and with the somewhat 'wounded' lines. 

Three features of a good portrait

People often comment on how a painting has captured the essence, the soul of a person.  Most of the time this is utter nonsense. Because painted portraits don't have captions, people fill in the meaning themselves.  And so they read all sorts of deep insights into the squint of the eyes, the elusive smile, the slight frown, the position of the little finger, etc, etc, etc.  These insights are in the mind of the beholder, not in the painting.  Different viewers see different traits in the same portrait. Nothing wrong with that.

The artist can help to stimulate the viewer by making sure that each portrait contains some of the following three features:
1. it resembles the person depicted (more about that in the future)
2. it contains an idea, refers to something, creates an intriguing atmosphere
3. it is sufficiently pleasing to the eye to revisit the portrait a couple of times
These features can compensate for one another to a certain degree, but good portraits have at least some of each.

Sculpting with clean fingers

My son drew my attention to Sculptris, a software program that allows you to sculpt on your screen.  It is magical!  You start with a ball and in no time you've created a figure, a car or in this case a North Korea style bust of Wilders. Check it out on Sculptris.com.  The download is small (only 3 MB) and free!