Dike mysticism, continued

Wim Kol and I took the next step in our Dyke mysticism project. We set up Wim’s architectural design on canvas, my usual format, 90 x 90 cm.

Then we looked at the palette of a painting by Dutch artist Jannes de Vries. Jannes de Vries was a member of ‘De ploeg’. An expressionist movement in the northern Dutch province of Groningen. They were most active from the 30’s to the 50’s of the last century. Strongly inspired by German expressionism from the 30’s, especially Kirchner. My wife Anneke and I are fortunate enough to own several paintings by Jannes de Vries.

Wim and I took some colours from the palette of the painting shown above and used them on Wims dike temple building.

Jannes used an interesting combination of colors here. They also have beautiful names, like ‘pale cerulean’ and ‘enlightening emerald’. That last one sounds like a Chinese investment fund…

Next step will be to add some surrealistic grey blue clouds to the yelow-green sky (in the top photograph, taken in Wim’s studio, if you look very carefully you can see them sketched already behind the yellow-green sky). Or more correctly: pale cerulean clouds.

And then print the architectural design in thick black lines over our acrylics. I can’t wait to see how that turns out. I hope we will achieve an interesting combination between stark architecture, dike romance, expressionist coloring, and a touch of abstraction in the sky.

I’ll keep you posted!