Jan Boelhouwers about some of my paintings
Jan Boelhowers presenting himself:
We all bring our stories
I feel the need to introduce myself in order for our meeting to be somewhat reciprocal, to clarify this deep resonance within myself to these works.
“I was born on the outskirts of Amsterdam. My parents had just moved there from the rural Calvinist south. Both my parents’ families had their feet firmly planted in the Dutch sea-clay, knew the wide-open skies above and respected the give and take from the sea.
Instead, I was the city boy, playing with friends on a cobble-stoned street of a red-brick working-class housing scheme. Until we moved to the outskirts of a small village. My new room in the loft had two windows: one looked out over the village, the opposite looked out over the meadows and wide-open sky. From then on, I lived in the borderland of an unwelcoming world of people and the free land where I was always invited. Over the years not much has changed.
I first saw the snow-capped mountains of the Alps when I was twelve. Then I declared to my friends: “I want to know more about mountains than anybody else.” I did that the only way possible in my teenage world: go to university. Eventually, I became an internationally-published professor in the landscapes of alpine and polar regions.
When I turned fifty, my heart lost hope and gave me the crisis I needed. Since then my attention has turned to the restoration of the young boy’s dream and find the wisdom of the self-willed Earth. I learned from the ‘martallar’ of Fårö, the mountain birch at the Sarek treeline, the Hammarskog oaks, the old stands of Fiby. I faced the educated stands of pine and the end of belonging in clear-felled land. I solo-hike the mountains.
In 2023, I spent an hour journaling in front of every painting in the ‘A Modern Era’ exhibition at Uppsala art museum. I learned from every single conversation, a reciprocal meeting full of inner resonance that I tried to bring into words. This is the path the young boy in the meadow was really longing for, but no one could show him the way – until recently.”
About "A kind of conversation"
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A kind of conversation (2014)
This painting is with in the book ‘Målningar’ (p. 121). A friend told Gudrun that he felt his body was full of ants because there was something he wanted to express but couldn’t find the words. That inspired her later to paint the woman figure with ants and the white woman next to her, which, I’m told, is the same person. To me, this painting provides the easiest access to understanding the imagery and expressive process of the artist.
In the article ‘Three assertions about the body’, Gene Gendlin uses the example of a poet who is stuck and cannot find the word he seeks (pp.28-29).
“As the poet reads and re-reads the lines up to where they stop, something further comes.There where the lines stop, the poem continues,but not in words. The lines stop, but the poem ..... .”
“The .....is the felt senseof how the poem goes on where it stops.”
“The poem implies something that is more intricate, more exactly featuredthan anything already known.”
“[Sensing, eventually a new]line lets the poet discover more than was there before. The line reveals, opens, expands, develops the ...... The line carries the .....further.It carriesthe .....forward.”
The painting of the ‘ants lady’ wonderfully expresses the felt sense that carries a frustration of a kind of creative stuckness where there is a clear inner sense that something wants to…, seeks to… but cannot yet find the expressionthat is just right. There is that tickling sensation in the skin, like ants crawling all over. There is also a bodily awareness of feeling ungrounded like one’s feet are not in touch with the ground. Instead, there is a lot of mind stuff in and above the head, (a clue to the mind clouds that sometimes appear above a person’s head in the artist’s paintings). But you cannot think your way forward, attention needs to be elsewhere.
The eyes are almost closed and directed away from the viewer. A wonderful expression of both the not-yet clear seeing and the need to sense inward for resolution. Also, the arms long next to the body that leave the belly open and warm and sensing – a clue to where the inner listening is happening. Note how the feet and ankles, arms and face are passive, lack vitality. Speaking for myself I often experience this when I feel stressed, too much mind cloud.
The red colour in the painting signaling where heat, an emotional energy, is found. Note that this is not restricted to the physical body. The artist knows herself to be a self-in-environment. There is a felt continuity, in this case it feels like the creative heat is also felt outside the body like the scratchiness of twigs and scrubs extending the antsy-ness.
The artist finds the sought expression that carries the inner life forward. This is the ….. of Gendlin: that what was bodily implied and now emerges. The listening to the … is a process that requires a compassionate presence to oneself and may need many small steps. It may take days, months, years, before the right understanding, the right expression is found. Hence, the title of this work as ‘A kind of conversation”.
Life is in flow again. The person painted on the right is the artist’s expression of what that felt like. There is a literal and figurative sense of lightness in the whole person. A feeling of upliftment that sweeps you off your feet, and yet does not feel ungrounded. Rather, there is a quality of spiritual lightness that makes me think of a rising Bach fugue. The transparent wings at the neck and the wide-open skirt feel angelic. And note how that lightness expresses itself also in the perception of environment: the light in the sky between the spruces has the same light tone as the body. In short, there is an expression of a harmonious state of bliss. The arms are folded, the chest more articulated. The eyes are open and present and meet the gaze of the viewer. The whole self is more gathered, in presence, a clarity of self has returned from the seeking process.
And behold! The words, like the painting, have found expression. The whole body is filled with forward living. This is what Meister Eckhart refers to as God’s ongoing act of creation through us. There is storytelling, all that needs to be expressed. I am not going to try and decipher the words, but two lines on the upper chest are easily read.
”Jag födde två snabba snöbarn. Dem har vinden tagit.”
I gave birth to two fast snow children. Those the wind has taken. (from the Norwegian poet Ellen Einan)