TED interview

TED did a short interview with me about making 52 portraits for the upcoming TED2011 conference. You can read it here.

Coetzee

My Coetzee portrait graces the cover of this week's Times Literary Supplement.

He is shown here venturing into the harsh light of South African reality.

Mouammar Gaddafi / Khadhafi in all his mad glory.

The mouth was inspired by an Otto Dix drawing.

NRC Handelsblad 24 Feb 2011

John le Carre

A portrait of John le Carre at the occasion of his latest book 'Our Kind of Traitor'.  Nice to keep the pen moving on the paper, without taking it off ('take the pen for a walk'), until sufficient likeness starts to emerge.

Ruud Gullit's dream

A dream came true for Ruud Gullit:  soccer coach in a rogue state, under direct supervision of the local dictator.  What more can a man want?  I wonder how the new coach of Terek Grozny is enjoying life now.

Karel van het Reve

Karel van het Reve was our most lucid essay writer.  With his simple sentences he invited you to take a fresh look at complicated matters or at widely held views.  Very seductive, very convincing and very funny.  His collected writings are published in several volumes now and this portrait was drawn for a review in Vrij Nederland.

His writing somehow prompted me to make a detailed drawing. Ah, the joy of slowly building up a portrait out of many small lines! Sometimes this is fun to do as a counterbalance to the much less controled watercolour portraits

The face of honest literature

Jeroen Vullings wrote a nice piece about literature that tries to please and literature that goes after the essence of things.   Without many names of authors to go by, I made up two faces to illustrate both approaches.  Here they are:  feelgood literature below and the other approach above.

    

My Cheney and Bush in the Met

I'm pleased to report that The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, has acquired two of my drawings!  They'll be used in an exhibition later this year called 'Shoot Folly as It Flies: Caricature and Satire in the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art' with caricatures and satires, from the 16th to the 21st century. Cheney, his master's voice, is one of them. The other drawing that was selected is a graph that summarizes the Bush' years. 

Philip Roth: Nemesis

Another breathtaking novel about fate and human response by Philip Roth: Nemesis. I echoed the dark tones of the book in this portrait. 

Roth is one of my favorite authors and it is a special pleasure to try and pay tribute to this master. This is where a good brush and paper come in handy, where the paint does the work almost by itself.

State elections

The state election campaign has started.  It is - as always- dominated by national themes.  The new cabinet (the political leaders Rutte, Verhagen and Wilders shown on the picture) has sent a clear message:  grab what you can and screw niceties such as nature, culture and history. Law and order. This land will once again be wonderful.  Glorious times ahead....

Mubarak

Mubarak continues to cling to his increasingly untenable position. The soles of his shoes directed at the people he says to serve.

Uri Rosenthal

Uri Rosenthal, the new Dutch minister of foreign affairs, has a good ear for Israel.  Maybe that explains partly why he has got troubles now over Iran? This drawing was published in NRC Handelsblad to accompany a piece about his threat to cut the financial support of a development organization that had provided funding for a Palestinian website. 

Konrad Adenauer

Konrad Adenauer is portrayed here as the threads between two parts of a cloth, joining both halves, keeping it together.

DR Peter van Straaten!

Today Leiden University grants Dutch artist Peter van Straaten  an honorary doctorate in psychology for the insight into the human psyche that his drawings provide.  Here Peter is shown at work.

Herman Koch

Herman Koch wrote a new novel: Zomerhuis met zwembad (Summerhouse with swimming pool).  The ingredients:  fun (see nose) and suspense (see background).
Once and a while I enjoy making these accurate pen drawings. It's interesting to suggest different textures (skin, hair, eyes, shadow) with the same pen, changing the length and the direction of the strokes.

James Ellroy

In James Ellroy's latest book, the autobiographical novel Blood's a Rover, his murdered mother looms largely once again.  So in this portrait he carries her picture with him, branded onto his skin, as a curse.  And there is of course not much sunshine. 

No more dirty hands

The iPad turned out to be a very handy time saving device for the 50 TED portraits. I used it for sketching and trying out different compositions.  The final  portraits were then done with watercolor and ink on paper because I can't do without the feel of a good brush on nice paper! So much so that I've never really started using my Wacom tablet in the past.

I was curious how other artists integrate today's digital tools into their work and started with a visit to Rhonald Blommestijn and Jos Collignon. It was a joy to see the two colleagues at work in their home studio's.

Rhonald Blommestijn does most of the work with his tablet, using sketches or photographs as starting point. In Photoshop he then carefully builds his powerful images to the point where they look like pen drawings, pastel drawings, paintings or photographs. See http://blommestijn.blogspot.com/.



Jos Collignon makes his political cartoons and other drawings with ink/brush on typing paper (!). He then scans the drawing and colors it in Painter.  Painter's amazing 'watercolor' possibilities give him what he wants. Quick, nice and his hands stay clean. Check out his work on http://www.joscollignon.nl.

Kluun in living color

Kluun is a very successful Dutch author.  He writes strong, colourful prose without literary pretense.  His new novel is about a spectacular marketing failure during the Gay Games in Amsterdam.   So here he is, in bright colors -think flags- agains a pink backdrop.  And the reader will understand why no red is used.  

Back on blog

I'll be sharing new work and comments on a regular basis again, starting today.  It wasn't possible in the past months, due to a lare assignment:  50 portraits for the upcoming TED conference in California.   Now that that is done, I look forward to be back on the blog.