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Date: Monday 30 January 2012 - Friday 24 Febuary 2012
Venue: The Wharf, Tavistock
Dutch artist Bert Bruins is showing work at The Wharf in Tavistock during February 2012. Bert, who has been living in Devon since 1990, paints mainly in acrylic and oils, and his main focus is the Westcountry landscape.
Bert said: "I love the plasticity of both oils and acrylic paint, although I'm always tempted to work with watercolour and linoprint as well. I am largely self-taught, having painted since I was 13, and I think that my work has reached a level of maturity that comes from being involved with art and creative work for several decades."
Bert work can loosely be described as post-impressionistic, although Bert prefers for the works to speak for themselves: "I love the history of art, seeing the progression of different art movements, and believe that we have reached a point where basically anything goes. Art doesn't have to be just conceptual or representational, it's ultimately up to the artist and the public to decide what they want to see."
To illustrate this point Bert will be showing some 35 works that include abstracts, close-up (macro) work as well as landscape and townscape.
"This will be an overview of the full range of my work, and works will be shown in a progression from representational to abstract. I have loved this year painting close-ups of natural scenes, natural patterns created by leaves, berries, pebbles etc, that are close to becoming abstract patterns. These are kind of a falf-way station between two very different strains of art. I hope the viewer will take from this that abstract and figurative art are not as separate as they sometimes appear."
Bert's abstract can roughly be classified as "serial" or "op-art", consisting of mostly geometric patterns with strong contrasts. These strong contrasts are a feature of Bert's representational work too.
"There is a magic that happens when you apply awareness of the colour circle to painting. Opposing colours (yellows v purples, red v green etc) have a vibrancy that pulls in the viewer and is arresting to the eye."
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