Kattepult Art & Illustrations

2011-06-06T14:45:00.002+02:00

A paint blob straight from the bottle onto the palet. It`s almost a pity to destroy it with a brush.

2011-06-06T14:43:00.003+02:00

2011-06-06T14:11:00.006+02:00

This is one I`m still working on. I often take photographs of paintings while I`m still working on them. It`s interesting afterwards to see the various stages the paintings have gone through and compare them with the final result.

2011-06-06T14:10:00.007+02:00

Another work in progress. I`m not sure yet where I`m headed with this one, though.

2011-06-06T14:07:00.002+02:00

A finished work. I`m doing a painting for someone on the theme of spring and am enjoying it so much, that I`m making a whole series.

2011-05-06T23:58:00.006+02:00

2011-02-03T02:00:00.001+01:00

Just playing around ..

2011-02-03T01:59:00.000+01:00

Some quick attempts in acrylic on the subject of sailing and trying to move away from illustration into something more abstract, which I still find tricky.

2011-02-03T01:53:00.003+01:00

2011-02-03T01:52:00.001+01:00

2010-12-15T18:03:00.005+01:00

Collision course in paint. One of numerous attempts to get a sense of speed and impact on paper/canvas.

2010-12-15T18:01:00.002+01:00

2010-12-08T04:17:00.000+01:00

2010-12-08T04:16:00.000+01:00

2010-12-03T12:04:00.004+01:00

These are some quick drawings done in acrylic. They are short flashbacks to sailing the Frisian lakes long ago. Cold, grey, windy, wet and beautiful. Sitting on the side of the boat getting completely soaked by waves lashing over the side. If you huddled close together, the person sitting behind was relatively sheltered and the person in front had to have good waterproofs or get soaked, which was usually the case, since our gear was mostly the worse for wear. Good times!

2010-12-03T12:03:00.002+01:00

2010-12-03T12:02:00.002+01:00

2010-11-26T03:22:00.001+01:00

A couple of recent charcoal drawings. When drawing faces I don`t usually have a photograph or image in my head. I just start with an eye or outline of a head, take it from there and see where it leads me.

2010-11-26T03:19:00.001+01:00

2010-11-26T03:18:00.002+01:00

2010-10-28T01:55:00.009+02:00

True to form, after writing about going back to working with charcoal, I then go ahead and post completely different stuff. Thing is that I like to work on different things at once. I`m the guest at the buffet loading her plate ( and then stuffing her face) with lots of different titbits instead of larger amounts of a smaller selection. It`s not that I can`t choose, I just like variation and I want to try everything and that extends to most areas in my life, including my work.
The box is all about inside versus outside, the age old theme of appearances which I find especially relevant in this time of so-called reality shows where everything is edited, of make-overs of people, houses and gardens because they`re not allowed to look as old as they really are, of magazines where photographs of already beautiful people are photoshopped until even they hardly recognize themselves. We never get the entire picture and the part presented to us is made to appear prettier than it really is. A damaged or scorched interior is not always visible on the outside but there are usually hints if you look closely. The shiny white paint covers but doesn`t hide little nicks and dents on the box`s surface just as make-up covers the skin, but doesn`t succeed in hiding either folds, wrinkles or our age and our lies cover the truth but can`t obscure it completely. Big theme for a little box.

2010-10-24T00:59:00.002+02:00

A lucky accident. I was playing around with my camera, hoping to make a photograph that had a sense of movement in it and I ended up with this. I am a pretty poor photographer, I know, but there is something about the contrast between the dog`s blurry head and more sharply defined body. There`s both stillness and movement in this picture.

2010-10-20T12:13:00.005+02:00

This is older work. I came across this one just now whilst searching for something else the way that happens. There are a few basic themes and shapes that reappear in my work at various times (portraits, the human figure, geometric shapes, the dogs, movement/speed) and the way I hop from one theme to the other, one medium to the other, and back again apparently at random is reflected in the order and irregularity in which work appears on the blog. I just post images that I find interesting, either new work or older work I have rediscovered, and hope the few people who visit this blog enjoy it. It`s funny how just posting a drawing or painting on my blog creates a distance and it is almost as if I am looking at someone else`s work. It`s very similar to framing something and seeing it change. As if it is somehow more finished and ready to be put out there and let go as strange as that may sound.

2010-10-19T21:46:00.002+02:00

In my last post I wrote I was going back to charcoal drawings for a while and here are a few portraits. These were done in a single session. I made a whole pile and put most of them aside, but these ones interest me, at least for now. I may look at them again later and and wonder `what was I thinking?`

2010-10-19T21:45:00.002+02:00

2010-10-19T21:45:00.000+02:00

2010-10-19T21:41:00.001+02:00

2010-08-09T02:22:00.004+02:00

acrylic on hardboard

2010-08-03T17:27:00.001+02:00

Haven`t posted anything for a while - never was much good at keeping a regular diary. Right now I`m taking a short break from painting and working with charcoal again which, along with pencil, is one of my favourite mediums.
Today`s posts, though, are two older works from a period when I was playing around with bistre and various types of inks.

2010-08-03T17:12:00.001+02:00

bistre and pencil on paper

2010-02-24T01:26:00.003+01:00

a door to a river

2010-02-24T01:20:00.002+01:00

2010-02-24T01:19:00.003+01:00

bridges to nowhere

2010-01-27T15:54:00.000+01:00

A doodle on canvas.

2009-12-23T03:38:00.004+01:00

Something completely different..

2009-12-23T00:18:00.002+01:00

Am trying to put this one on canvas at the moment, but am beginning to wonder whether it`s going to be an improvement. You never know, though and it`s worth a shot.It`s a fun experiment.

draadcula

2009-12-23T00:08:00.002+01:00

Dutch word play

I like what you`ve done with the place

2009-12-23T00:00:00.002+01:00

home improvement

2009-12-19T17:53:00.000+01:00

2009-12-19T17:52:00.001+01:00

2009-12-19T17:49:00.000+01:00

2009-12-19T17:31:00.003+01:00

The question now is that when you draw a doodle with the intent of

(possibly) translating it to the canvas, is it still a doodle or has it been promoted to a study? According to the oxford dictionary a doodle is `a drawing made absent-mindedly`, so maybe a doodle drawn with intent is, in fact, not a doodle at all?

2009-12-19T17:15:00.006+01:00

A few months ago I began a doodle diary. A long-time compulsive doodler, the idea was to add a doodle-a-day in a cheap drawing pad (the type with ultra-thin, recycled, grey paper, not unlike cheap toilet paper of the sandpaper type) and, once the pad was full, to put a few of them on canvas and see whether it worked. The drawing pad is full of doodles and I`m about to start with the next stage. But first, here are some doodles.

2009-08-05T02:57:00.002+02:00

A design for a card I did for friends announcing the arrival of their second child. The final, printed version is slightly different with a coloured band running round the edge of the card, but I rather like the elephant in a white setting. I enjoy doing these cards immensely because they are very personal to people and are (usually) sent out to announce a happy event. Also, I get to try out something different every time. It never gets boring.

2009-07-30T11:25:00.002+02:00

One of a series I started on last year and want to get back to in time. There`s another one on this page (see below, right). These are groups of people posing together (as if for a camera), their bodies seem partly melded together, one dark mass, dressed similarly and faces indistinct/unrecognisable, but still they are somehow separate, looking at the camera/viewer and not each other. I want to convey the sense of being `alone in a crowd` or the basic `aloneness` or `separateness` of a person even when in the company of others, be they friends, family or strangers, a feeling/sense I have always assumed most people will recognise, albeit experienced differently by each of us. I may be completely wrong and this could be something peculiar to some and alien to others, I don`t really know, but I`m hoping I`ve managed to get this onto the canvas with more succes than I am having attempting to put it into words.

2009-07-28T17:15:00.000+02:00

Why stop at the edge of the canvas?

2009-07-28T17:07:00.001+02:00

Another collision course

2009-07-27T17:31:00.004+02:00

One in a series of `collision course` paintings. A recurring theme in my work is movement. I try to bring a sense of movement, speed and/or strength to the work and hope the viewer feels it, rather than sees it.

2009-07-25T17:27:00.002+02:00

Over a year ago I set up my blog, put a barebones profile on, stuck in a few photographs of some of my work and decided I`d get down to posting some text the day after. We`re now more than one year along, the pictures are still the same and here, finally, are the first few lines. For someone who didn`t grow up `online` this is a fairly big step to take, since ... what to write, really? I`m an artist and I draw and paint pictures and hope they do the talking for me and mostly they do. But now that a very good friend of mine has put a link to my blog on her very good blogspot (thanks Kim!), I can`t leave things empty, so now the plan is regular postings of work and maybe a few lines to go along with them when I think they`re needed.
So off goes the first posting of, hopefully, more to come.