Jowan van Barneveld
My work mainly consists of paintings. It often refers to music and the music world. Aside of fascinations I have with certain bands that more or less play a role in my work, my own existence as a musician also does. Lately I have performed and recorded quite a lot with my stonerrock band Viberider. The other band I have been in since a long time is the two man band Psychoschq. This band is more connected to my visual work and produces one time only improvisational sessions that are immediately recorded and spread among interested people through my own record label schq-recs. It’s sometimes called a movie soundtrack for a non existent movie, or a soundtrack to a moment. Music I believe is already around, and only needs to be received and recorded. Kind of like the way images seem to work their way into my paintings sometimes.
The motives within my paintings at the moment are either landscapes or stages. The landscapes are often based on anonymous internet sources, the stages are based on photos I take of the empty stage from the wings, just before performing. Generally I am looking for contemporary scenes of the sublime, places where we can lose ourselves or disappear, places bigger than us.
I regard two works from 2005 as my very first paintings. These paintings mark the moment I decided to start working from photographic sources, when before I concentrated on a working method in which I drew everything from the top of my head and valued the development of a personal handwriting in painting. This also was the moment I decided to ban colour from my work and restrict myself to only using various qualities of black paint. The paintings I made before this moment where very colourful, and colour played a very charged and associative role in my work. In short you could say that I threw my personal handwriting overboard at that moment, a decision I still strongly believe in.
The working method I’ve used since the emergence of these first paintings is one of gradually building up the painting in different layers of black acrylic paint. I work from light to dark, and thus gradually darken the image while working on a painting. It often feels like I’m lighting the space within the painting as if it were a movie set. In this way I black out excess information and put the spotlight on the areas in the painting that play the main role in the painting.
By banning any personal handwriting my work gains in impersonality ,which I greatly value, especially because it puts the focus on other aspects of the painting than the unicity of the single work and its maker. It can for instance shift the focus to the combination of works within a presentation, as if it where scenes within one movie.
Generally I am happy with the distance that is created by working in the medium of painting, but I have also been trying to work in a more direct sense ;to produce work which can be physically experienced and which is what it is. Banning personal handwriting all the same, but still containing the same sort of double reality as my paintings often posess. This led to the creation of a couple of installations, one of which is ‘invocation 1 [Kurt Cobains greenhouse]’, that has been shown in my first museum solo in the Netherlands at museum Het Domein Sittard in 2009. This installation is a 1:1 recreation of the greenhouse above the garage at Cobains house in Seattle. My main objective in doing this installation was the recreation of a space that only exists mentally and to be able to experience the presence of this place.
The motives within my paintings at the moment are either landscapes or stages. The landscapes are often based on anonymous internet sources, the stages are based on photos I take of the empty stage from the wings, just before performing. Generally I am looking for contemporary scenes of the sublime, places where we can lose ourselves or disappear, places bigger than us.
I regard two works from 2005 as my very first paintings. These paintings mark the moment I decided to start working from photographic sources, when before I concentrated on a working method in which I drew everything from the top of my head and valued the development of a personal handwriting in painting. This also was the moment I decided to ban colour from my work and restrict myself to only using various qualities of black paint. The paintings I made before this moment where very colourful, and colour played a very charged and associative role in my work. In short you could say that I threw my personal handwriting overboard at that moment, a decision I still strongly believe in.
The working method I’ve used since the emergence of these first paintings is one of gradually building up the painting in different layers of black acrylic paint. I work from light to dark, and thus gradually darken the image while working on a painting. It often feels like I’m lighting the space within the painting as if it were a movie set. In this way I black out excess information and put the spotlight on the areas in the painting that play the main role in the painting.
By banning any personal handwriting my work gains in impersonality ,which I greatly value, especially because it puts the focus on other aspects of the painting than the unicity of the single work and its maker. It can for instance shift the focus to the combination of works within a presentation, as if it where scenes within one movie.
Generally I am happy with the distance that is created by working in the medium of painting, but I have also been trying to work in a more direct sense ;to produce work which can be physically experienced and which is what it is. Banning personal handwriting all the same, but still containing the same sort of double reality as my paintings often posess. This led to the creation of a couple of installations, one of which is ‘invocation 1 [Kurt Cobains greenhouse]’, that has been shown in my first museum solo in the Netherlands at museum Het Domein Sittard in 2009. This installation is a 1:1 recreation of the greenhouse above the garage at Cobains house in Seattle. My main objective in doing this installation was the recreation of a space that only exists mentally and to be able to experience the presence of this place.
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installation2009_E20905.png)
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installation detail2009_E18855.png)
Stage 1, 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
51 x 67 Inches
Acrylic on Canvas
51 x 67 Inches
Stage 2, 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
57 x 79 Inches
Acrylic on Canvas
57 x 79 Inches
Cave Painting, 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
51 x 118 Inches
Acrylic on Canvas
51 x 118 Inches
Stage, 2009
Acrylic on Canvas
Acrylic on Canvas
Stage, 2010
Acrylic on Canvas
Acrylic on Canvas
Installation shot, 2009
Invocation 1, Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse
Invocation 1, Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse
Installation shot (detail), 2009
Invocation 1, Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse
Invocation 1, Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse