Frits Van Eeden

Frits van Eeden refers to himself an abstract artist. He considers himself a sculptor first and foremost, even though the amount of paintings he produces is prolific. Van Eeden is also a printmaker, having mastering the art of etching. Experimenting with new media and techniques, Van Eeden's sculpture is both free standing and relief. Rembrandt, Picasso and Henry Moore have influenced him the most and when one examines his work these influences becomes apparent.

Van Eeden was born in Tilburg, Holland, in March 1944 and grew up in The Hague. He attended The Hague Academy, Delft School of Art, the Royal Academy and Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He was privately taught by Ed Strelitski. Strelitski, who was a graduate of the Hague Academy, in turn, introduced him [Van Eeden] to Theo Bitter, Wim Beuning, Bram Roth, Derek Bus, and Jan Goeting, all major names in the art world at that time. He worked in Goeting's studio for a time and it was at the older artist's invitation that he applied to the Pulchri Studio in the Hague. The Pulchri Studio is a 350 year old group of Dutch artists from The Hague School. It resides in a grand building in The Hague. Famous members of The Hague School are Vincent Van Gogh and Piet Mondrian.

In 1969 at the age of twenty two Van Eeden was accepted into the Pulchri Studio in sculpture and painting, the youngest member at the time and the first to be accepted in both painting and sculpture. He once told a story about a teacher who insisted he do one thing well. Van Eeden said he never could choose, he loved art in all its forms. In 1971 Van Eeden spent time in England studying the work of sculptor Henri Moore. Van Eeden creates with a passion and energy and in his 40 year career has amassed an enormous body of work in many mediums.

I was able to study under van Eeden briefly and was impressed that for a great artist, which he is, he is humble, approachable and an excellent teacher. His training at the academies qualify him to teach. He loves to demonstrate his skills and does so often near his home and studio in Melbourne Florida. He loves to talk as he paints, both encouraging his students to practice their art, but also shares his craft in minute detail. Much of what I do in design, painting and drawing have their origins in listening to Van Eeden and his students talk about the creative process. I found it easy to learn from him. I studied figure drawing with him and was taught to construct the human form by breaking it down into basic shapes allowing the composition to flow from my hand with a tension between control and free expression, varying the quality of line as I drew. He insisted a student should conquer the world of realism before entering to abstraction, but the drawing process he taught easily lent itself to either direction. Van Eeden says he paints and draws intuitively. He has somehow passes that on to his students, it is the genesis of abstraction. He explains it like this, "when I work my mind is just a few seconds beyond my brush stroke but in balance with it." I came away from his influence with neither choosing pure abstraction nor realism but always seeking a tension between the two.

Van Eeden has a home and studio in The Hague and has had one man shows throughout Europe. He shows regularly in the Pulchri Studio. He is in galleries in the The Hague, Melbourne, Cocoa Beach and Palm Beach FLA, Hot Spring, AR, Hong Kong and Singapore. His father is Dutch and his mother of Indonesian descent. His art is influenced by both European and Asian cultures.

Van Eeden has always stayed true to his bold, energetic style which he loves to create in large scale. In most of his work you can see the influence of the cubist painters like Picasso. His older paintings are more subdued but his work over the years has gotten more colorful. He believes that is from the confidence an artist obtains by just painting and painting. I believe living in Florida; the light, atmosphere and culture has influence his work, which is very colorful, but held together by that he calls ugly colors. He teaches his students to use them in contrast with a more brilliant palette.

I chose three paintings and will discuss one. They reflect the style in which Van Eeden primarily painted when I knew him and was able to watch him paint and speak on numerous occasions. The two paintings of a couple are almost identical but painted years apart. They reflect his instructions to his students to work in series and to do a subject over and over again until it was done or we were done with it. It is a means of exploration, conquering a subject or mastering a skill. "Why paint one Madonna and Child when you can paint 14."

The other is a painting of a horse, a very reoccurring subject of Van Eeden's, taken from his childhood spent riding horses on the sea shore. One reason he chose Melbourne Florida is because it reminded him of his home in the Netherlands. He has property with horses outside the city.

The painting is called Couple. It was painted in 2001 in his studio in Melbourne. The oil on canvas consists of two figures encapsulated in a womb like environment. On the outer canvas is a suggestion of a frame. Inside the frame is the color yellow which gives the effect of inner lighting; there seems to be a light behind the figures. This creates a sense of the painting being part of a relief sculpture, two figures sitting in a shallow space. The woman is sitting curled up with her knees to her chest, the man is on his knees leaning over with his palm up. The woman has one hand stretched out and one hand against her lowered forehead. They are not so much intimate, but seem to be struggling for intimacy. They are speaking or trying to speak to each other. The colors are soothing and complimentary; blue and orange hues. The lines are bold and show the spontaneity of brush stroke that is characteristic of Van Eeden's work. He paints on large canvases with large household type brushes and works vigorously layering lines and shapes on top of each other. This gives his paintings an almost woven look. The painting has the feel of a chalk drawing. The color is often dragged across other layers of paint so that the back ground color shows through giving the painting a transparent quality.

The position of the figures and the way in which they are turned to each other holds the composition together. The two hands form the center of focus that begins a spiral movement in the painting that goes from hands to knees to the woman's buttocks up the back of the women to her head and down to her lap. The eyes are drawn to the area of the head and hands. Both figures gaze at the center of that area in the painting, not at each other.

The work is asymmetrical and achieves a sense of balance because of the frame like structure surrounding the figures. The more I look at it the more I like it. It achieves the ideal the artist espouses; the painting is constructed with a tension between the abstract and the real, between spontaneity and reason. There is repetition in the placement of color especially that colors that stand out; red, yellow and white.

The painting is typical of the size canvas Van Eeden paints on; a 4' x 5' canvas. His figures are life size. He has done numerous mural size works. A recent mural was painted on the outside of the Brevard Museum of Art and Science in Melbourne Florida where he is teaches sculpture and intermediate and advanced painting classes.

Van Eeden is a figure painter who paints abstractly, intuitively. He has done hundreds of compositions where couples are depicted in series of embraces that are often tender, not sentimental, just wonderfully expressive. The positions of the figures are like a language that he uses to tell us about our relationships or maybe the relationships we long for.