LOGGED AND DRAWN

picket fence

2011-03-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

A piece I entered for the show 'Het innerlijk Behang' organized by the 'Kopsalon' a very interesting initiative by Ellie (H.F.) van Steensel:

I dragged them in, these wooden posts, once part of an unpainted but elegant picket fence, tarnished by sun. That was when I regularly wandered the back alleys of Boulder Colorado, my adopted second hometown through my resident lover. I bicycled and walked those alley's in wonderment, it reminding me of the rambling walks I did when young in Rijssen, Twente. Unpainted picket fences, a town close to nature, within rather, the foothills of the Rockies. I like to dream, I woke up there within a dream, lucid with Boulder's blinding light of a mile high

light of a mile high atmosphere.

'The Lost and Found' (Gevonden Voorwerpen) these alleys. My lover once found a penny jar with change worth $200.
I found a strange garden there too, filled with colorful plastic items, toy pets etc. Soon it became my favorite spot, especially because I sometimes couldn't find it in the maze of these alleys. Once staring into it again, to my sudden shame I spotted the owner, but we started talking. Before I knew I sat down with him in this garden with a cup of tea. While surrounded by these toys he spoke of Einstein, how he liked to play, his own performances on Einstein; I spoke of wonder and painters block...

Last autumn now 9 years after my first walk there, I looked but I couldn't find it, it didn't surprise my already dark mooded mind. Another garden gone... But I have my fence posts, at least they are still there, now in a corner of my Amsterdam apartment.
All is there when I look at them. Writing the piece I remembered the garden's owner, and wanted to ask him if I could 'use' his garden for this piece, maybe the poem he wrote on Einstein as well. I found his name, Len Barron, easily done as I remembered he was/is a well known performer in Boulder. I asked him about the lost garden.
He wrote me back within hours, giving a happy consent and responding to my other question:

"you asked if the garden was gone.
yes. however, the last couple of months
i was there, i had folks come in and pick out
a piece they could put in their garden.
so there are pieces from the garden
in gardens around town and in several states
as well. good fun."

                                                        Einstein loved

                                                cigars and pipes and ice cream
                                              and playing the violin and sailing
                                               and he loved loose fitting clothes and
                                   stormy weather and treesand walking and he loved

                                                  physics and justice and education

                                                  and he loved being corrected
                                                        for it would save him
                                                            from continuing
                                                                 to climb up
                                                                  the wrong
                                                                         tree

                                       and oh did he laugh the laugh of a contented seal

                                                                                                   Len Barron

Objet trouvé: The Annies

2010-10-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

The Annies, wood, oilpaint, charcoal on canvas.

Objet trouvé, how does one 'trouve'(find), where? Or does the object find you, if you want it or not?
As much as The Annie's is about The Annie's, it is about the frame, a context, or how the totality of a work comes about; the here and now creating a piece...

The wooden frame, as shown above, I found in a dumpster in the parking area in the middle of a warehouse district in North Boulder (Colorado) where I got my first studio. I rented it from a woman who basically with American verve and her unstoppable argumenting made me rent it, but way below the price. The studio remained my favorite over the years of all the studios I rented in the Boulder/Denver area, the renter a great friend still.

I never thought I would end up in this place, a town once crowded with writers like Ginsburg, Kerouac and Burroughs. While dreaming of the US with an almost aching longing that started back at 18, when out of the blue in my home town of Amsterdam I met my love who happened to live in Boulder, Colorado. I had very few ties left, being newly orphaned and a brother gone forever in the same time frame, so I was more than ready to travel and start my second adolescence as a 'drifter', which I did thoroughly over the years that followed...

After my first visit in 2001, I traveled back as soon as I could for a second time to set up studio and work; I was also more than ready to start anew within my work as an artist. Having been a deadly control freak and allowing myself hardly any freedom, I instead now took the frame out of the dumpster, and with a few other back-alley and dumpster finds, built a basic studio which I would pack and unpack approximately 15 times over the next 7 years.
For a long time already I had studied William S. Burroughs' work utterly fascinated with his methods of writing/creating (through books like 'The Job', 'The Burroughs File' and his letters). What I liked about his method was that it often evolved around found material. Even cheap western books, descriptions of what he saw or heard (I oversimplify here), creating like a movie director would, a set, scenery, a few actors… He would cut up the pieces he wrote, put them back together, repeating this process endlessly.

Thinking and writing about how it would apply to my own work, I stayed stuck, my material wasn’t alive or lived. I was basically a dreamy librarian of ideas and material. After I started traveling to Boulder/Denver to work there as an artist though, the movement/traveling (alternating every 3 months between the US and Amsterdam for 7 years) created a method that I could have never thought up, not even with all of my ‘scholarly’ background.

In that first studio in the industrial part of Boulder, I started the well loved part of setting up workspace. Over the years I managed to do so in one day; one day unpacking, one day packing up. What follows, the creating, used to be the hard part, but this new environment didn't give me a chance to stay stuck. Not knowing the US and Boulder from my own experience, I emerged myself in a culture and a surrounding that really no book or movie can depict... I walked the back-alleys full of exciting trash, and drove an old 'found' bike everywhere, (which in my very hot shame, was asked back by a bunch of shy Mexican boys a couple of weeks later).

back-alley's in Boulder and Denver, 2001

With no show coming up or anything set up for shows yet but looking to do so, I discovered the hardly known system in Holland of the juried show. In general it's a very democratic system, with the work you send in judged merely by its own merits. In this case it was a show in Denver in CORE Gallery while it was still on Larimer street. It’s a now gentrified, then mostly industrial and pretty rough area near the train tracks and the baseball stadium. There were lots of art spaces and I was lucky even, a few years later to rent a studio out there for a few months. In the fifties and sixties Kerouac and friends hung out drinking and musing in jazz joints, still a few there, along with the usual addicts and sad homeless people that for a large part happen to be black or hispanic; where one bar advertises its one dollar beer from seven on in the morning, yes, for me at the time utter, black, romanticism, it would bite me in the ass later.

Larimer Sreet, 2001, Denver

The show had the theme 'Women' and as I hardly ever painted women, I considered it time to do so, not hampered by the fact my mother had recently died which left me with an inexplicable anger... During that time I happened to stumble across a yard sale where people offered a stack of Boulder University college yearbooks of the fifties and sixties that I bought for 50cts a piece and dissected with a lot of love. Those local faces from Boulder frozen some 45 years ago got me out of time, into 'being', something recent death does as well, as it had.

Once I had put up some cutout photos the painting formed as a dream, no thinking, no conceptualizing, stapling a piece of canvas behind(!) the heavy American oak frame (that had acted as transportation wood for some construction), painted with thin paint over the lines. With a glowing metal tool I inscribed a sentence on the frame. I had to deliver the work that same afternoon. It was chosen and hung in the show, and somehow couldn't help myself from hanging it over and over in shows during the next 8 years. I did so even within the last show this summer in the OBA; this last spring I finally transported it to Amsterdam, walking it home, taking it on the tram, by hand.

None of The Annie's would have come about without the context of my life at the time, there and then; the frame itself showing a 'backdrop' that if I would have a million, I would buy it back for that amount any time. I covet this painting probably for that reason so much, never sad not to have sold it. Carrying this frame, this painting to another show, another country is like carrying a live asset. For me the ability to create is not something natural, much rather for me it is the ability to create or find the right circumstances, the right context, the frame before the picture.

Shows and projects: oba ode

2010-07-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

WERK egge altena, ebelina brethouwer in oba ode amsterdam
when and where

                                                                   Was sich liebt das neckt sich
                                                                    oilpaint and charcoal on linnen
                                                                154x67cm

                                                                                       Robbers Roost
                                                                                     oilpaint and charcoal on linnen
                                                                154x67cm

                                                                  Loreley
                                                                                   oilpaint and charcoal on linnen
                                                                                 154x67cm

                                                                                       '...Signifying nothing' (after Heinrich Fussli)
                                                                                          oilpaint and charcoal on linnen
                                                                                        120x67cm

                                                                                         Lionnessgirl
                                                                                         oilpaint, ink, charcoal on linnen
                                                                                         120x67cm


                                                                                                                 OVERVIEWS

overview with 'Meisjesjurk' van Ebelina Brethouwer

(in)visible

                                                  The' (in)visible' project this time at the OBA

Shows and projects: (in)visible, the book

2010-01-10T23:59:00.000-08:00

...

Shows and projects: (in)visible

2010-01-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

Masterclass and show within the project (in)visible 2009/2010:
(in)visible: Investigating forms of presentation of the Artist' Book.

                                           Coloradan
                                           bookcollage, 31x46cm

and my addition to it:
http://www.in-visible.nl/deelnemers/egge-altena.php

http://www.in-visible.nl/onderzoeksresultaten/invisible-nr-04.php#

Definitely one of the most satisfying projects I ever did, monks work to the core.
And who can complain showing next to Jan Dibbets, with his beautiful little book: 'Roodborstje Territorium', which shows the flying pattern of a robin in the 'Vondelpark' in Amsterdam. The leafs of paper of the book show 7 drawings and 7 'inks' with wax, semi-multiple; and 7 tests of William S. Burroughs, citations of 7 different books of his, handcopied, more on this in a blog in making.