GREENSLEEVES || Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs







Poen de Wijs (Dutch artist) 1948 - 2014
Greensleeves to a Ground-2, 1997
oil on panel
30 x 40 cm.
signed Poen de Wijs 
private collection

Working together on one painting. In the history of the European art this is no new phenomenon. If it benefited the quality and the unity of style was not harmed no buyer or patron used to mind.
In our days it is rather exceptional when several artists together make one painting, the more so if they also want to maintain their own style. Poen de Wijs and Marion van Nieuwpoort have dared to take this great risk. What started with a mysterious experiment in lithography ended with some spectacular multiple panels under commission and ultimately it gave a new dimension to their artistic life.
In 1994 they painted “Masaai Mara Melody” (250 x 300 cm)
In 1997 Poen and Marion were given another opportunity to work on a painting - a triptych this time (300 x 120 cm). A commission that led them to Eastern Europe, a culture unknown to them. After a remarkable journey, in which they were penetratingly faced with the inhabitants and the history of Bulgaria, they designed and painted the monumental portrait of a European family going to and fro between two cultures. A portrait in which the husband -forever, or how much longer? - seems to be condemned to the role of traveller and the wife is bound to him in dedication, but always in two places at the same time; which is the beginning and which is the end of their journey?
That year they made “Isabelle’s Tune” another triptych (100 x 140 cm). The painting shows Isabelle, a Dutch girl growing up in Kenya, between its people and animals. This work of art shows, more clearly even than “Maasai Mara Melody” (1994), to what extent Poen de Wijs and Marion van Nieuwpoort have managed to achieve in their joint paintings, a synthesis of the power of imagination of both of them. Here Marion's boisterous colours and contrasts have already made way for a more graded and restrained palette, whereas Poen de Wijs shows himself somewhat more exuberant in his use of colours.

Text: Gerard Kerkvliet , from “Poen de Wijs” – publication De Twee Pauwen 1998

Poen de Wijs