Free Paintings
Everything that comes my way can become an object of my admiration, meditation, study and, as a result, transformsĀ into some form of visual art. As a multidisciplinary artist, I immediately see in which genre this or that subject of my inspiration will be embodied. Nature is an endless source of inspiration for me. Almost all of my non-figurative paintings are about nature. But one series of paintings differs from the more abstract in careful naturalistic elaboration. This is a series “Self portrait”(Ā hands)
āA hand can tell a story. When I first looked at theseĀ worksĀ I immediately thought of theĀ workĀ of some of the old masters of the classical period. Michelangelo was a masterĀ inĀ the art of painting hands. If you were to observe only the hands of the figures embellishing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you would see that these hands express as much as do the faces. The most well known image is, of course, the gesture of God towards Adam. Two hands that reach out to one another and which almost, but not quite, touch. Another thought was of the many medieval portraits of the Virgin Mary, those where she is ascending into heaven with outstretched arms. But also of those where she isĀ inĀ prayer, or surrounded by others and reaching out to them or they to her. OneĀ workĀ is actually entitled āPrayerā and that word has been chosen with some reason. AsĀ inĀ her earlierĀ worksĀ Lucy combines time, space and the human figure into something depicting a short momentĀ inĀ time that takes placeĀ inĀ the context of a greater whole. Just asĀ inĀ theĀ worksĀ of the old masters, Lucyās hands are carefully painted with anatomical accuracy and an eye for detail. But the classic drama of a biblical drama is absent. It is a moment capturedĀ inĀ time, a hand attempting to tell a personal story which has something universal at its heart. It is the story of an artist who remembers a moment, who is awaiting something, who paints an experience which tells a story. Lucy herself speaks of her paintings of hands as her āself portraitsā. The hand itself can tell something about a person, it can express something, it can show a feeling or an attitude. But the hand is more than those things. And these hands tell a story. They are open, they seem to float above a warmly coloured or a grey background. They tell a story but show only a fragment of that story. Just asĀ in a portrait, where only a part of a person is seen, here we see only a hand, the subject of theĀ workĀ being, for the major part, invisible to us. Another thought arose of a different order. The hand is involved with the making of the painting itself. It is the hand which stretches the linen, which holds the brush, which hangs theĀ work.āā
āĀ Walter van der Cruijsen, director of the Temporary Art CentreĀ inĀ Eindhoven.