Peter van Loenhout
27 artworks by Peter van Loenhout.
Last artwork was added more than one year ago.
Making a painting is like playing in the sand.
Sitting on the yellow ground I set my first line, later crawling, until I stood.
It was the sandbox that my father had made, in which my worlds arose and everything was possible, with the amazement of a child, that it was always different. The excitement of scratching the sand, building out of nothing, but above all the pleasure and immersion in making, which was playing.
I didn't know then that 23 years later I was back in the country.
Next to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I drew the Golden Ratio on a piece of land between two trees. That was for my graduation project at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
I sat there scratching the sand, which was graduation.
Now I know, a little older, that wherever I am, the sandpit has stayed.
I prefer to paint sitting on the ground with the sand of the soil where I am at that moment; the orange-yellow from the Dordogne, the red from the Cevennes, the black lava sand from Naples or the grey from my garden. In the layers over it I paint shapes and colours that I create in response to each other and the surroundings.
Powerful and impulsive or just balanced and almost merging into their surroundings. Sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative. The structure of the sand and the colours of the earth mingle with light, until a form arises or man or animal, on paper or on canvas,
It doesn't matter, as long as it's making it play...
