G.J Veenstra (1957-) - Schaatsen elfstedentocht

That there is great interest in the paintings of the Frisian artist Gert-Jan Veenstra (Workum, 1957) both at home and abroad is not surprising.

His work fits into the realist tradition of the old Dutch masters, who made Dutch painting world-famous.

But there is more. Veenstra's main subject is the Dutch landscape. A theme that through the centuries has inspired not only visual artists.

'What remains is landscape,' wrote the poet Ad Zuiderent, and his colleague Rutger Kopland commented on it: 'The landscape gives the illusion that time stands still, but that is an illusion. It is such an endlessly slow event that we cannot experience it. We are only short-lived passers-by. As far as I’m concerned, poets should make time visible, and indeed time becomes most visible in an attempt to stop it.'

On his canvases Gert-Jan Veenstra makes time stand still. He shows us landscapes and cityscapes that were here before we arrived, and that, hopefully, will be here for a very long time after us.

Yet Veenstra's paintings, made with astonishing craftsmanship, are by no means 'painted photographs'. Often they depict scenes we could see with our own eyes, but what we saw would never correspond to a painting by Veenstra. The artist interprets reality.

A realistic interpretation, certainly, but not a copy of it. The atmosphere he uniquely manages to create is unmistakably his atmosphere. His work, however realistic, is recognizable and irreplaceably his own.