Last summer I looked very much to the clouds. It was not a summer of blue sky here in the Netherlands; very often the sky was divided by drifting clouds in all kind of colours. I could watch the sculpture-side of the clouds by the difference of light-intensity. But most important, I very often watched how the colours got broken, how they changed in a way as if they were no colour any longer. You can compare it with music, it sounds like a melody. But it is possible that the color of the melody disappear, and then there rest just sound, no music any longer.

It is important to me to realise the possibility of this shift, because I noticed it already coming in my own work. Sometimes I have the sense - while painting - that I destroy the colours itself and that colour becomes just a functional thing tot the whole, just a special kind of resonance. I see the clouds come back in my recent art. And also something of the late Monet, who arranged so different colours together in his painting that he created an almost 'ugly' expression. I appreciate this very much, where I never payed it attention in former years. Form and counterform than asked for my attention, now the melange of colours.

   gouache, made in spring 2008

I think that destroying the paper in the painting-proces ( as I mentioned in the last mail) will be temporarely, but you never know for sure. It is strange,  but there are certain times that I just must go on with something while I am hesitating and even disapproving all the images whivh grow. I can not use thinking or deduction to make the jump. Sometimes I am just collecting by making visual material and only afterwards It becomes evident for myself what opportunities it has created in the next painting. Future is uncertain, also in painting. You can not always be in charge, than the painting itself dies.

Fons Heijnsbroek   

Last months during the painting of my gouaches there appear frequently holes in the paper because of scratching or using the brush more as a knife than a brush. It is not because I want to make marks, nor is it a cocnept. it just happens or not, and it always has something to do with a strong desire to modify the surface of the paper, the face of the paper. It is not a concept nor it is a program. With one gouache they appear, with the next they don't, because the scratching happens more in the paint itself. Of course I remember myself Fontana who was cutting his canvasses, but that is another story. I just really enjoy it watching the holes who are coming in the paper, together with all the other carves in it and the paint on it. I enjoy the experience that paper is just paper and not a plane or a space. Away with illusions? Just realistic?

I scratched last mont a lot in the paper I am painting on. I mistreat it in some way. In another way it is a abstract way of tattoo. Sometimes I can paint a line, sometimes I do this by just scratching or carving the paper. By doing that the identity of the paper itself is changing for me. It looses its character of basic-comfort, as also the German contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is analysing our wealthy part of the whole world as a comfort-zone, in which we live our lives. Also the paper and the canvas in painting and drawing is usually reassuring. It is just there! What happens when this is not always the case? When there can be holes and gates in that ultimate ground of our perception? By that uncertainty the paper itself becomes even more present. Every time now I see the paper nice flat and unschratched, I think: it could have been ploughed up. I mean, so the identity of the paper becomes richer, more complex just by the possibility of being scratched and partly destroyed.

Fons Heijnsbroek