Artist Irene Verbeek (1945) warmly welcomes me in her painting studio in Oostum. The wood stove is burning, the tea is ready, and the dog Resade is sitting patiently in her basket. The Groningen autumn light pours in on all sides. This year marks forty years since Verbeek painted the ceiling on the dome of the Groningen City Theater. She talks about what happened at the time.
“I had an opening in Pictura when Ton Post, then director of the Stadsschouwburg, asked me whether I had registered for that assignment in the theater: a painting in the theater hall and in the mezzanine foyer. This was at the time of the Visual Artist Scheme (BKR), where artists could receive an income in exchange for works of art. However, I didn't know anything about it. But Ton emphasized that I really had to register. I was able to submit an idea design just in time.
The assignment was to make a modern painting in an old building, otherwise the interpretation was completely free. My idea of Apollo and the Muses was immediately there: Apollo as protector of the arts and leader of the Muses. My dream was to make a fresco. It soon turned out that that would take too long, because the entire project was only three months away. I initially proposed painting it on canvas and then covering the dome, as Marc Chagall did in the Paris Opera, but that too was too grand a project – Chagall needed a year. Ultimately, I delivered my design, based on the template technique, in scale 1:50, 1:20 and a detail 1:1, including a model of the foyer. Post and Kramer, the architect, lay on the ground to view this design.
I thought: this is not true, this is the dream of my life!
Pretty soon, I got a call and the choice fell on my design. I thought: it's not true, this is the dream of my life! I'm quite a stage animal, crazy about theater and music. What more could you want than to be able to create such a work in such a building? That period at the Stadsschouwburg was one of the happiest times in my life.
I was very afraid of heights, and the dome is over 20 meters high. At first I really walked on eggshells over that enormous jetty with wooden planks. I tried to think, this is necessary, this is part of it. And actually very soon, after the first day, I was singing and whistling. The scaffolding became like a piece of my own body. One day I was walking outside and stepped on a regular sidewalk and I screamed! That was the tension I had built up from working on the high scaffolding, the fear of stepping on it. There was constant renovation going on around me. It was often icy cold, sometimes rain, and then very hot again, all quite difficult for your paint. It was quiet at night, so I often worked there alone. The theater became my home at a certain point, I came and went with my own key.
Painting the dome itself was difficult: you stand human-length under the dome, you had no view of the whole. While removing the scaffolding, one of the construction boys took me by the hand while he said in Groningen: “Oh, look at it, girl, all the colors!” I became drunk with happiness when I saw the nine-meter long line of the floating dance of the muse Terpsichoré, which was correct. Oh man, what a feast!
I got drunk with happiness. Oh man, what a feast!
I also used the same ideas for Het Viaduct on the Hereweg. I had previously made a series for the Martini Hospital, in which I combined photography with the ink roller technique. I wanted to show how everything around us, even the things we hardly pay attention to, influences us. Jan Hoekstra, pulmonologist and collector, had seen this work and approached me. He said, I have a pied-à-terre on Hereweg, there are a few windows and I actually want to close them, but I find it unsympathetic to just close them: I want passers-by to see something. I then enlarged details of the viaduct in screen printing to show what you walk or drive over every day. We leave our mark everywhere.”