By Hanneke van Oosterhout

Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

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Hanneke can’t post today and she asked me to fill in for her. I wanted to remark on an interesting trend in some of the comments about her work. For example, looking at an image of Old grapes, new painting, Colin Jago wrote “I seem to be looking down on the grapes and up at the glass.”

For Colorful Underpainting, Steve wrote “my first impression was that the cloth was somehow mounted on a wall. The bunch of grapes and the way they rest on it make this interpretation virtually impossible, of course, but I still don’t feel the correct perspective as strongly as I would like to.”

Hanneke paints her still life paintings “from life” and she tries to paint what she sees. Is she trying to show multiple viewpoints, or to produce distortion in perspective? Not intentionally, she has said. But is she doing so unintentionally?

Let’s take a look at Hanneke’s imaginary still life drawing and see if can find out more about the viewpoint issue.

In this imaginary still-life, the vessel is seen directly from the side, but the table top and fruit are seen from a different perspective, from above. We seem to look down on the table top while looking at the vessel from the side. This merging of different perspective points lends an interesting quality to the imaginary drawings. More examples of her “multiple viewpoint” imaginary drawings are here, here and here.

Let’s compare this to a drawing made directly from a real still life the same week when she made the imaginary drawings:

Do you see the difference? In this drawing from a real still-life, multiple viewpoints are not manifest. The fruit and the vessel are both seen from the same viewpoint.

I think that Colin and Steve are on to something with their comments about Hanneke’s painted still life work. In the “from life” still life paintings, the perspective may be technically correct, but she sometimes manages to produce a feeling of different viewpoints nonetheless. Would it be interesting if she tried to bring this difference in viewpoints more explicitly into her “from life” still life paintings? Or, should she work to correct the apparent flaw when it occurs?

Imaginary still life in red chalk by Hanneke van Oosterhout

Drawing still-life from her imagination has given a new dynamism to Hanneke’s work. Look at the rhythm of the forms she creates here. This looks like it would be awfully complex to paint (and where is she going to find a skull?).

Drawing by Hanneke van Oosterhout

I have to confess that I used to think of still-life as the most boring art from. Hanneke van Oosterhout’s paintings have raised my appreciation of ordinary everyday objects, which is nice. But her imaginary still-life drawings add a whole new level of intellectual and artistic interest for me in the still-life genre.

This drawing of a glass of beer is exciting despite being of a mundane topic. I think that working from imagination allows Hanneke to tap into a new level of creativity (sorry for the lousy pun).

Where she is going with this approach, what will be the final result, remains to be seen.

This snail doesn’t seem to like beer so much.