Tucked away on Visserstraat, you will find Henk Kraayenzank's studio. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful studios in town, and in its details reveals the dedication of the artist who has been working steadily on his oeuvre since the 1970s. We spoke to him in his studio about his art.
“In high school, I hesitated between writing and fine art. I am not someone who drew from an early age; it was more about me searching for an identity. I grew up in the countryside and I always felt comfortable in that isolation. I think this slowly steered me towards being an artist, despite not having a clear idea at the time of what exactly that entailed. I used to work in an artists' association café, and there I found a group of kindred spirits where I felt at home. I made the real decision to become an artist one afternoon. I just grabbed some paint and paper and then started making art. It was a very conscious decision and that was the beginning of my career.
I made the real decision to become an artist one afternoon.
As an artist, but especially as an autodidact, you depend on the people you meet. A person and their work are ultimately nothing more than the confluence of a mountain of influences. Sometimes this is in the form of great artists like Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg, but often it is also the colleagues you meet and the conversations you have with them. A writer who has always fascinated me, not only because of his work but also because of his development as a writer, is Patrick Modiano. There is a development in his work that is somewhat similar to what happens in my work. His stories are constructed with a very limited number of building blocks: a father, a mother, the city of Paris, a bookshop/publishing house where he worked and so on. The context is always different: elements are absent or prominent, there are jumps in time, etc. Using the same building blocks, he always makes something different and something similar happens in my work too. There are image fragments that are sometimes absent for a few years and then reappear in a slightly different way. In Modiano's early work, he uses these fragments to create a more or less completed story, something with a beginning and an end. But in his later work, everything falls apart into loose fragments. I think I have ended up in the same place in my work. Characters, places, events appear, but they don't lead anywhere, they just disappear. Memories are just fragments with a wafer-thin relationship between them. This is similar to the iron wires I use to connect elements in my work of the past few years. These elements are loose fragments that do not form a whole together, but still have an exciting relationship with each other.
Over the years, my work has evolved a lot. I used to have a lot of energy and felt I had to communicate through my art. I wanted to show how beautiful life is and needed to tell my story. After my mother died in 2006, I used a lot of material from her estate, which carried an emotional charge. But that has since been exchanged for other materials. Whereas before my art was a means of communication between me and the audience, now I mainly ask the audience to dive into my work itself.
I just sit down at the worktable, start working and that's it.
Some artists lean very much on the theories behind art, but I just sit down at the worktable, start working and that's it. I don't work with the pretence of trying to invent a new visual language. My work table is always full of things I can use. I work with whatever is at hand. From that, I take something and glue it onto a canvas or other medium, and then I get to work. What you glue on first usually falls apart the quickest. You then have to demolish that with a hammer and a chisel. The skin of the work changes because the remnants remain, and so you slowly build up something. Very occasionally, a work comes together quickly and is a simple process, but other times you work for weeks at a stretch. The ground often shows how smoothly the process has gone: if it is quite clean, little has happened to it. Acrylic paint is the trickiest to work with because it is hardly sandable. It is a fascinating struggle with some works, even with a small panel. What I make has to be exciting to look at, and the composition has to be well put together. My work used to be much more colourful, but these days the colour is fading. The work becomes quieter and tends more and more towards assemblages than painting or drawing. It focuses more on composition, rather than me as an artist still looking for a handwriting or capturing an emotion. If the work feels ‘right’ to me, then the combination of materials is exciting. I have to be happy with the feeling that the work fits into my oeuvre, but still brings something new. What that is exactly is hard to put into words, but it's in very minimal things. The only thing I want to avoid at all costs is starting to repeat myself. It should also remain fun for yourself.”
Text: Dinnis van Dijken
Photos: Sander van der Bij