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There is a spontaneous directness and exuberance about Jeanine de Waele's painting, a passionate enjoyment of things seen, and an eagerness to portray them. One can sense her pleasure in her work which comes from the heart.
Mary Fedden R.A. |
Jeanine de Waele, a Dutch painter living in Devon has been painting for more than twenty years. Her works have been shown in regular annual exhibitions across the West Country as well as in London. She has also had her paintings included in a number of Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions.
Bold and daring, her paintings bring vibrant light, brilliant colours and gaiety to landscapes, still lifes and figurative painting. Working in mixed media Jeanine's paintings are characterised by refined use of colour which gives an emotional and even spiritual quality to her work.
Jeanine draws her inspiration from the natural world. Her paintings have a lightness of touch that communicates an instinctive love of nature. Unconcerned with classical perspective and form, Jeanine is interested in the exploration of multi-dimensional relationships within her paintings and the constant discovery of the mystery of what makes a work tick.
After her training in arts in education in Amsterdam, she spent numerous years working alongside established artists in Deya, Mallorca. Critics have commented on the influence of Chagall, Matisse and Cecil Collins in her work.
After experiencing the warmth and reflected light of Mallorca, it is small wonder that years later Jeanine was so inspired by the special qualities of the Scilly Isles that on a painting trip there she produced the most successful series of original works of art. But the rural landscapes too of her beloved Devon, seen from her doorstep over the rooftops of Totnes, are always filled with warmth and light. For this reason it would be impossible for Jeanine to paint a muted grey and brown landscape - these colours are simply not in her vision, for to her colour is not a photographic representation of reality, but is instead an expression of emotion, a means of portraying a spiritual response to nature.
Visionary is perhaps a word that aptly describes much of Jeanine's work. All her paintings spring from reality, but something happens as she works on them in her studio. She begins by drawing and painting the bones of a work directly in the landscape, or resorts to still life and portraiture when the weather is bad (bringing in elements of the outdoors such as cats and flowers), but she feels too overcome by nature to aspire to represent it exactly. Instead she nurtures her paintings in the studio, sometimes for several years, until the moment arrives when she can use her memory and imagination to transform them into something more personal. As well as an instinctive and exploratory sense of colour, Jeanine also has an innate feel for design, seeking patterns in the scenes before her, but manipulating them back in her studio.
Jeanine is unafraid of experiment as a painter. Not content to remain with a set formula that will simply sell, and despite the constraints of earning a living from her work, she tries new mediums and ways of expression. Although gouache, pastel and crayon proved ideal mediums when fitting in painting with the demands of bringing up young children, now that her sons are older she is developing a very personal technique using oil paints.
Like so many mothers, for years she has struggled to juggle the responsibilities of motherhood with her compulsion to paint and her need to explore the world of nature. One senses that her artistic career is now poised to expand.
DB Publishing