![]() It would have been finished in time but work was delayed due to a bruised thorax. This commissioned portrait will be displayed at the subjects' wedding party exactly like this in five days time. He works in a wet on wet technique in oils and finishes each face separately because wet on wet technique needs to be completed in one session even if it lasts a few days. "Painting a portrait is hard enough work, I don't need to make the drawing part hard as well." Each face takes about three or four days hard work to capture. Now he projects his drawings and captures the lines in charcoal on his virgin white linen canvas. ![]() Vermeer and Frans Hals, for example, used optics of some type to project the image onto the canvas to be drawn which is the only way to capture those light natural smiles and compositions.Įven though his work was photograph-based, Bo had always painted in a realistic manner scaled up in the grid manner. Hockney determined that there were two schools of realistic painting in the 16th century, optics (with the aid of lenses, camera lucida, camera obscure and curved mirrors) versus drawing, direct observation of nature. He shared a revelation he came across about 15 years ago when reading a book by David Hockney who spent two years studying his studio walls plastered with images of realistic art from the masters. His response to that comment was "Well, then Frans Hals is not a portrait painter because his work is loose and natural!" Response to his early work was that only stiff poses created "portraits" and loose, more natural spontaneous poses were not "portraits". Happily, his health returned but he's careful not to let it slide.Ĭatching the natural element he's looking for in his portraits takes a lot of luck and sometimes accident to arrive at the right photograph to work from. A few years ago he was like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, stiffened up and hunched over from some unfortunate medical condition possibly due to the stress of having to finish an important painting for a competitive exhibition with his contemporaries, this dancer jumping in her green dress. No, it seemed perfect!Īlthough he’s not a big cook, he tries to eat as healthy and organic as possible for his health. He was just cooking a big pot of chicken stock when we finally arrived and asked us to offer an opinion on whether there was too much lemongrass in it. When he craves more comfort he spends time at his girlfriend's place, a close 4 km away but mostly he’s here working on his classical oil portrait commissions. Like many city-dwellers he doesn’t own a car but travels when needed by rental car or taxi, by far the best way to drive a car in these small crowded cities with absolutely zero parking space! He even drove a taxi for a year and thoroughly enjoyed it but decided his body didn’t enjoy it plus it took time away from his true passion of painting. He's lived here on the third floor for the last 25 years, very central to the core of Amsterdam. Even as a child on the canal boat coming back from the dark countryside to the bright lights of the city he knew he would live in the city when he was older. Eventually it was time to head off to school and he moved in with his grandparents. Bo grew up on his parent's 400 ton Dutch canal boat for the first seven years of his life and loved it. Steep narrow wooden stairs lead up to his bedroom, his darkroom, an annex and a small kitchen leads off the back. ![]() Light comes in from both sides of the main room where he works on his paintings and also photographs his models. No wonder the Dutch are all so slim!īo's studio and home are very spartan, almost monk-like and dedicated to his work of portrait painting. Again three steep (but not so narrow) flights of stairs to reach his apartment. Well, of course we got a bit lost, took a few wrong turns but eventually got there. We climbed the steep, narrow and practically vertical wooden stairs to the tiny Airbnb apartment we will stay for the next three nights, quickly unpacked, got plugged into the internet, caught up with a few things then headed off to meet Bo Bakker in what Google Maps estimated to be a 32 minute commute. After visiting family in South Africa, we traveled to Utrecht, and then Amsterdam.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |