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Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs
Poen de Wijs (Dutch artist) 1948 – 2014
Salto Picturale-1, 1981
watercolour
25 x 35 cm.
signed Poen de Wijs 1981 
private collection

Poen de Wijs was born in the town of Nijmegen, in the east of The Netherlands. As an introvert boy he liked to withdraw with his recorder, studying baroque music for many hours a day. During secondary school he already started at the Conservatory of Tilburg. His childhood sweetheart Margriet, with whom he was to marry soon, started studying flute, while Poen discovered that he actually liked drawing more than the recorder. To his surprise (and of his parents) he was attended to the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague. There he felt at home and found his destination. But music never left his life. Although drawing had becoming his passion, he still liked playing along with his wife or with other musicians. During his studies he lived among music students, and when in 1971 he bought a large, fourteen-room dilapidated house, the rooms were soon to be filled with musicians. All day long the house was a cacophony of sounds, while Poen was working in his attic studio (the place where he still works).

The first years of his career he worked very abstract, and from 1977 he started to paint more realistic. This is also the year that the musical group Flairck formed in his house, and soon gained a big succes in the Netherlands. One of Poen’s first realistic watercolours was chosen by the band for the vinyl cover, under protest of the record company. Many lp’s and covers were to follow.

In his earlier period Poen combined nudes with abstract elements. Later he combined images from art history with contemporary subjects. Since the 1990s he has interwoven the theme of cultural integration into almost all his works. Poen likes to paint the people of today, young and old, men and women of all races and cultures. He surrounds them with animals, with musical instruments, with still lifes, with decorative patterns, with structures, in a virtuoso game and with brilliant technique.

To see more of Poen's work, have a look at his website here: http://www.poendewijs.nl/