Charcoal is her medium. With it she draws meter-high landscapes on canvas. Dutch jungles. Nature that is allowed to go its own way. Biodiversity. Anouk Griffioen’s canvases are of museum quality.
Good artists with biodiversity as a theme are few and far between. For this reason, the sustainability magazine P+ presented the overwhelming landscapes of Anouk Griffioen in a P+ Special. In it her Dutch jungles in black and white. The special thing: Griffioen became known with enormous portraits of fashion models. Gradually, those beautiful women disappeared into the rough undergrowth of her meter-high canvases. Are they still there? Will they ever come out again?
“We need to move towards organized messes”
Anyone who sees Griffioen’s work (1979) thinks of Louise Vet. Anyone who ever listened to this professor of ecology immediately thinks of her advice on how we can rearrange our land in a natural way. Not too strict and not too tidy. “We need to move towards organized messes.” That’s what Anouk Griffioen’s work looks like. It’s as if nature has taken its own course on her canvases. Anouk ‘nailed it’, Americans would say.
An important source of inspiration for Griffioen is garden artist Piet Oudolf, who in the Netherlands created gardens for the Singer museum and museum Voorlinden, among others, but also for the most famous restaurant in the world: Noma in Copenhagen. The magazine P+ also portrayed Oudolf in a Special about biodiversity.
Griffioen was overwhelmed when she walked over the abandoned railway line above New York, the Highline, many years ago. There Oudolf showed the Americans which plants and flowers grew on their own prairies.
“I was completely in love with Piet Oudolf”
In P+: ‘Anouk went there again and again. I was completely in love with Piet Oudolf, she says. So awesome. That real nature, surrounded by a sizzling city. It fascinated her. Billboards protruding above, as public exhibition space for artists. To be allowed to hang there. In five years I’ll grab one of those billboards, she promised herself. With an enormous drawing, as an ode to Piet.’
With the general public Griffioen’s work is known because she made the drawings for the painter in the popular TV series Penoza. She also made a portrait of Anne Wil Blankers in the series Sterren op het doek (Stars on Canvas). She drew the back of the actress’s head, but was chosen by the portrayed as the work she wanted to take home.
That disappearance of women plays a major role in the P+ Special about Anouk Griffioen. Even when she is photographed, she likes to hide in the shadows, or behind her wild black hair.
She has nothing to complain about regarding interest in her work. Museum committees visit her studio. In a lecture hall of Erasmus University hangs a very large canvas of hers, measuring six by three meters. Also an ecological landscape. A professor of psychology said about it: ‘At last I have something beautiful to look at and refer to during my lectures’.
“We want to bring nature into our home with you”
Private individuals also buy her work. She sometimes hears such customers say things like: ‘We live in such a concrete box, we want to bring nature into our home with you’.
She has to think about that when she sees Prime Minister Rutte on TV standing in front of a meaningless artwork. Griffioen in P+: “Man, can’t you hang something else there? Give me a call.”
