Doreen Wittenbols
You probably know that we love great brushwork, installations, and art with ethereal elements. We found them all in the paintings and installations of Doreen Wittenbols; we hope you enjoy her work as much as we do!
Doreen Wittenbols is a Dutch - Canadian artist, currently based in New Mexico. Her work is influenced by her experience immigrating to Canada as a child and later returning to the Netherlands as an adult. Her impressive background includes the prestigious academic Governor - General’s medal upon graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She would earn her MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, and complete two artist residencies in The Netherlands.
She shares:
Transition, transformation and the search for ways to fit in and still express myself independently have become the recurring themes in my work. The stages of puberty and adolescence especially fascinate me: the physicl and hormonal changes; the vulnerability, awkwardness and melancholia; the knowing and not knowing yet; the state of innocence while reaching one’s full (sexual) potential; the discovery of one's own and society's vision on gender and sexuality: its attractions, differences, and revulsions. This fascination still rings true in my work today, in my figurative as well as in my abstract paintings: the adolescent continues to be my ‘background’ muse. I am always looking for ways to articulate fluctuating, vulnerable, and ambivalent states - especially the intimate fears, desires and experiences concerning love, sexuality, and gender. My use of symbolism is extremely layered and has become my artistic style: a kind of idyllic darkness or pleasant melancholy. l have a strong attachment to oil paint: a medium that is messy, sometimes difficult and disappointing, but simultaneously sensual, seductive, feisty and fluid, like life itself.
Since 2012, my art practice has become increasingly experimental: I’ve introduced (semi) abstraction in combination with figurative painting. I have also experimented with painting on unstretched canvas, oval-shaped surfaces, paper, book covers, discarded postcards and inkjet prints of personal photographs. The resulting artworks are often one-off series or ongoing projects consisting of paintings, painting installations and/or painted-on photographs. I have also moved from my easel and the wall to the flat surface of a table top, to experiment with pools of oil paint on paper, pulling abstract or recognizable shapes and images, or leaving them untouched as a finished work. I am also exploring other flat surfaces in order to study the different reactions of paint and I am becoming deeply fascinated with the ‘alchemy’ of paint. Other works in progress are experiments with arrangements of oval surfaces and objects made explicitly to serve as parts of a larger whole. I usually work process-based, starting my creative process with a collage of photographic references from a particular idea, and then work associatively in the actual creating process, adding elements as I go along, allowing the paint and forms to transform.
See more at her website and Instragram
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