Jan Wessendorp

Johannes George (Jan) Wessendorp, born in 1940 in Surabaya (Indonesia), started at the MTS voor de Fotografie en Fototechniek, The Hague before pursuing his artistic desire and education at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, The Haque, specialising in painting, drawing and design technique. He became lecturer in Drawing, Colour and Form Technique at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten St. Joost, Breda and was one of the apprentices of Paul Citroen, Rein Draijer, and Hugo Liebe.

Primarily a painter, Jan Wessendorp is a versatile artist whose works range from drawing and graphic to plastic arts (sculpture). Wessendorp creates figures and characters that show openness, even vulnerability, yet they are never defenceless let alone aggressive. They manifest themselves by their unusual look and posture. Despite their subdued emotions, one can sense the fear, compassion, happiness, loneliness and even some love there.

From time to time the frame around the canvas no longer becomes boundaries of the image, it rather becomes integral part of the artwork. While in some, it transforms to an autonomous entity with its own shape, materials and meaning.

Wessendorp’s works have been collected by a number of museums and national organisations across The Netherlands and Belgium. His graphic piece paired with poetry by Albert Hagenaars is now in the collection of Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven. In collaboration with Auke van der Heide, he created the striking  sculptural landscape object, titled “De Emmer van Toen is de Buis van Nu”, a concrete tower adorned with zinc buckets, in the vicinity of the utilitarian waste water treatment plant.

Born:
1940, Surabaya, Indonesia

Education:
MTS voor de Fotografie en Fototechniek, The Hague
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, The Haque, specialising in painting, drawing and design technique

Artist’s Statement (freely translated)

“Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.” (Albrecht Dürer)

This quote by Albrecht Dürer is the guideline in my work and life. It not only relates to nature, which becomes visible around us as an object world, but also, as far as we are nature ourselves, to our physical and intelligent existence. Nature makes herself known in us as our own special nature and specific talent. This quality determines the kind of attention for that object world, through which a world of ideas and feelings opens up. The artist’s struggle is to arrive at a distinct form of experience that is then expressed in a specific painterly ability. The development of vision, originality and expression is determined by an uninterrupted self-education and training, in all aspects of the artist’s life. In doing so, all lower impulses become subservient to the higher and are absorbed! 

“Art is hidden in nature” 

Artistic image is not so much supported by external characteristics, but even more by substantive implications, which are the result of that growing consciousness. The possibility to move and communicate in art: to set the viewer inwardly in motion and thus to encourage a self-experience, does not lie in the passionate desire of the maker to communicate himself, to influence others, or in the lust of design. This possibility lies in the artist’s ability to create from the source of life that he has been able to tap into and to which he has been able to give an authentic visual form! 

“Whoever can extract it, have it!” 

Jan Wessendorp