When Karel Appel was still making wooden sculptures, like this ‘Windmill’, nobody would give a cent for the work of the young artist. It was shortly after World War II. Karel Appel (1921-2006) had completed his education at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam under the German […]
I find it fascinating how in TV series history is dramatized to make a story exciting, full of ‘cliffhangers’. The streaming services go quite wild with their series about Vikings. In their primitive villages, Viking women emerge with complicated hairstyles as if they had spent
Once there was a first of everything. Or: the first. Saint Anthony Abbot was the very first monk in the world. Known to us as Saint Anthony the Abbot, he lived from 251 to 356 AD. He withdrew as a hermit to the eastern desert
After first being banished to the waste container, wood is completely back in interior design. This is noticed by artist Christine Langerhorst (1937), who already ran galleries with wooden art objects in Utrecht in the 1960s. Langerhorst makes magnificent books of wood. She was born
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A man sits on the stump of a tree trunk and plays a singing saw. As if mourning the sawn-down forest. The small painting is a typical Teun Hocks (1947 – 2022). On almost all his works he has depicted himself, as a man lost
The artist Femmy Otten (1981) succeeds in conquering the museum with her wood-carved artworks. With her impressive solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, she lifts wood sculpting out of the realm of craftsmanship by exploring major themes such as sexuality, womanhood, motherhood and vulnerability.
Her wooden rug invites jokes. Like: ‘This carpet no longer needs to be beaten’. In the art world, however, the work of Selva Aparicio is taken very seriously. This rug carved out of an oak floor, for example, is about ‘memories from my childhood’. Selva
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The first monk in the world had woodworm problems. What to do? A reflection on this masterpiece by German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. The faces of wooden sculptures from the 15th and 16th centuries look very dated today. Those high shaved foreheads of the women. All
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The heat of the tropical night. The ocean black and blue. A mouth tells stories. A memory of Bonaire, the paradise of the Netherlands in the Caribbean. The history of carving in wood began with a flat surface. Beginning wood carvers also start with a
Wind ripples. Ripples, in English. The sea creates them on the beach when the water retreats at low tide. The wind creates them in the drifting sand in the dunes. On a very windy day on the beach of IJmuiden I saw how they formed.
