The fifteen brilliant acrylic paintings on the long gallery wall are portraits of Clevelanders. These are mostly of Ms. van de Vliet’s new American friends she met since July 31 when she arrived in Cleveland. Portraits projected onto Savon’s hanging apparel installation are of van de Vliet’s friends in Holland. Some of each projected portrait falls on the apparel hanging in mid-air and other parts of the image lands on the wall behind it. This exhibit looks different depending on whether a viewer sees the projected portrait from the left or right of the installation.
“(Ferris) was part of developing the concept behind the installation focusing on turning the two dimensional into 3D, while inviting the viewer to walk through and take part in the installation. His own work was not shown at this show,” said van de Vliet.
“I like playing around with the intimacy of friendships,” she said. Her style resembles hyper-expressive experimental comics that are simultaneously realistic and extreme. “Color is emotion,” she said.
She works from photographs of her subjects drawing her impression on canvas (not by tracing the photograph) followed by “dreaming” the rest in acrylic paint. She captures the subject’s likeness while the portraits are many forms in one. Lines, stars, circles and squares glow through realistic facial features. While they may appear to some viewers as projected onto the portrait’s face, this, according to van de Vliet, is “the glowing light within.”
Many of her subjects are actually people that she is close to. She has known some of these people for some time. And producing a portrait from a sitting model is passé. Instead she produces a portrait after having seen the subject in real life situations over a period of time. She sometimes sees how a person maintains their emotional balance before producing a portrait.
Before traveling to Cleveland she didn’t paint for six months. “I fell in love with a guy, and spent my time with him.” She arrived in the U.S. on July 31, sans boyfriend, and started hanging out with several people who became her subjects. She started her first Cleveland painting on Aug. 11. This was of her boyfriend back in Holland, Wietse, painted from a photo of him sent to her. Another early painting of this series was of the quizzical face of a cat who is having fleas picked from its back. “What’s going on in that face?” asked van de Vliet.
She works on two or three paintings simultaneously and completed all 15 portraits, and one collaborative piece, in about a month. (Half the speed of Vincent Van Gogh, another Dutch favorite said to produce one painting a day.) The 16th piece, “Jam Session,” is a “spontaneous undertaking” between van de Vliet and South Euclid muralist, illustrator and painter John Howitt. “We had a lot of fun communicating with one another without words but through art, a lot like what musicians do when developing songs while having a jam session,” van de Vliet said. Some of van de Vliet’s commercial illustrations are used as cell phone screen savers.
When seeing van de Vliet’s paintings it is easy to recollect the “Psychological Expressionism” show by Cleveland area artist Sid Rheuban at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery earlier this year. Mr. Rheuban’s wildly bright portraits are bold and distorted like the early 20th Century French fauvist painters.
This is very different from the otherworldly refined style of van de Vliet. While their styles are vastly different both artists provide characters that glow from within. Rheuban paints in oil and acrylic and some of his work is painted on one side of Plexiglas providing an image that can be seen from two sides, “allowing two different emotional perspectives,” according to that show’s release.
“I like it here,” said van de Vliet. “There is a kindness about people here. People are more open. In Holland people are more closed than here. Here people talk to each other everywhere. It is easy working here. It is relaxed.”
Karen van de Vliet’s Web sites is http://www.karenvandevliet.nl. Gallery Ü can be reached at 216-323-0085 and http://www.galleryucleveland.com.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Lee Batdorff batdorffATadva.com
(:divend:)