inspiration
With material, paint and colour I create a space on the canvas with a sign or a pronounced movement as reflection of my being.
This is what I say when I am asked what my paintings’ meaning is, what inspires me. My paintings do not have a meaning, they are what they are, a reflection of my being. But I realise that this explanation is a bit too simple, of course there are deeper layers in my work and in this text I will try to explain what these layers are and what inspires me.
The most important thing in my life and in my work is pureness. I encounter this pureness in a lot of areas which are a big inspiration for me, such as people, music, literature, movies, and nature.
My dearest friends all have a very pure character, they are real, authentic. There are no surprises because they are honest. My partner and love of my life Henry has the purest character imaginable. I do not know a more honest person. Only the fact that I am surrounded by real and authentic people makes my work pure. That is why I always search for soulmates, from whom I can learn and with whom I can share. Peter Schenk and Jiro Inagaki, my most important teachers in art, are soulmates for me. They taught me a lot about painting and papermaking, but above all, they showed me how to express my heart and soul in my work.
Besides these deep contacts with my partner, my good friends and other soulmates I also feed my soul by contacting other people. I am a person of extremes, not a lot of grey for me, it is almost always black or white. Finding that in the other person makes me happy. From time to time I spend time with a group of mentally disabled people and they teach me a lot about making real contact. When we are in Italy and we can have a look in the kitchen, where the cook is trying to tell us with her hands and feet how to make the perfect pastasauce, for me that is much more important than the shallowness of today’s life in which we so easily strand.
When I start working, first of all I listen to rock music. I prefer the ‘old’ songs from the seventies and eighties. It brings me in a certain flow, a rhythm, an emotion which feels familiar to me. You have to think of songs with a beautiful melody, which is suddenly disturbed by a scream from the heart, a rough emotion. Nirvana’s singer, Kurt Cobain, was a master in this. So is Bono from U2. You can hear it in the old songs from Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Deep Purple, you name it.
The flow triggered by this music helps me to reach the deepest layers of my soul and all the events and experiences in there, in order to express these on the canvas.
After work I really like to listen to an opera; I love to daydream a little while listening to an aria of Maria Callas.
Literature and movies inspire me, because they tell people’s lifestories with words or images. Painting is of course an other language, but in this language I tell my lifestory. That is probably why I am so interested in other people’s lifes. Even in this respect I search for pureness and authenticity. If a story is beautifully written or filmed with an eye for detail, feeling for light and darkness, knowledge of the craft and respect for the story and its emotions, then I can be touched to tears.
I often find the inspiration for making my compositions in nature. Dutch skies are the most beautiful in the world. The sea is at its best when it is storming. The composition of an upland plain in my beloved Italy is beautiful. I like it most when there is something disturbing: a dead olive tree, a ruin in the middle of a landscape, a cartrut in a meadow. Like the disturbed rhythm that I love so much in music. That is my thing. I am always sketching these things in a small notebook. For me no rippling landscape; mountains with firework hanging above it, that is what I love. And that is what I try to express in my work.
All of my experiences and history give my work its depth. I work layer after layer with paint, handmade paper, other materials, as long as I need until it feels pure for me, until it represents me, until it touches me.
Petra Poolen
(born on July 29, 1966 in Heerlen)