“I had almost forgotten what it felt like, that desire to create images.
That is why I am very happy that I still took the step to start painting.”
Pia van Velde: from Surrender to Creation
It is January 2021 when we first meet. She hurriedly leads me to the studio. Not because the phone rings or because the dog needs to be taken for a walk, but because she has no time to lose. She wants, or rather, she has to paint. Already too much time has gone, and there is still so much to learn. And to paint. Time is running out.
“Are you actually related to Bram van Velde?” I ask her casually. “That’s right, we are direct relatives of Bram and Geer, because they were brothers. Not only Bram but also Geer was an artist, and a good one too. It was only after their death that I found out that we were family, which is a shame.” Yes and no, I said to myself, because at least she discovered her passion for painting entirely on her own and not because of ‘being related to’, with all the advantages and disadvantages that such a family relationship can bring.
1983-2004
Her father did not allow her to go to art academy. A long cherished wish vanished. But when she – at the age of 33 – introduced her dad to an artist – Mon Wolters (1933 – 2004) – he recognized that he was wrong and apologized. This acknowledgement did her well, but in the meantime her professional life had become a long quest. She was never in her place anywhere. Nor did she find the satisfaction she was looking for. Until the day she met this artist and, as she puts it herself, and the art of painting “happened” to her. For more than twenty-one years, their life together was dominated by painting. Mons painting. Due to his frail health, they led quite a secluded life, partly in their country home in France. The countless conversations – and the endless looking at his paintings – led Pia to identify completely with Mons work over time. Little by little, his paintings, although not painted by herself, became part of her.
Yet, despite her complete dedication to his work, it was Mon who urged her to start painting herself. Aware of Pia’s eye for composition and color, and her great artistic knowledge and feeling, he asked her, at the end of his life, to give up her professional life and to further develop his oeuvre. His complete work would be fully at her disposal and she would be allowed to breathe new life into it. On one condition: in complete freedom. And so it happened that, after Mons death in 2004, at the age of fifty-four, Pia was on her own: “Yes, but what could I do? The loss was great. How can I ease that, I was thinking by myself? Indeed, by painting myself, and by finally “listening” to myself.”
And that’s what she did.
2005-2021
Initially with hesitation, but as of today with full conviction, Pia continues her late husbands oeuvre – mainly consisting of painted diptychs – according to her own insights. Alex de Vries (writer, curator and art critic) aptly wrote: “With this approach, initiated by Mon Wolters himself, traditional concepts such as authenticity, originality and craftsmanship are put in a different light. It goes without saying that Pia van Velde works in the spirit of Mon Wolters, but she can only put herself in the work. She surrenders herself to what has been given, so that the work will survive.”* Their joint decision to make diptychs does indeed survive, but on the basis of Pia’s personal motives: “Compared to a single canvas, a diptych is more elusive, the total image produces a visual friction with which I like to confront myself.”
Pia doesn’t paint from a preconceived plan, but from her intuition. She alternates subjects such as landscapes, windows, flowers, leaves, bodies, citrus fruits, pottery (vases) with abstract elements such as the grid, vertical stripes, triangles and spirals, whether or not in the same tonality. She works with acrylic paint, water-based oil paint, and organic material such as dried leaves and fruits thus creating a multi-layered surface, of which she enhances existing contrasts through the use of form and color.
“I paint to become who I am.”
The human ambiguity and the accompanying – mutually reinforcing – contradictions, rather than the search for symbiosis in form and content (as was the case with Mon), offers Pia’s work the complexity in which she recognizes herself and life in general. Pia: “My work is about contradictory human nature. On the one hand we want symbiosis, and we long for solidarity and unity, on the other we strive for autonomy and diversity. Man has to constantly reinvent himself. You never know exactly what is going to happen. This also applies to art: time and again I have to battle with the canvas and make choices with regard to structure and transparency, density and color, surfaces and lines. The decisions one needs to take is what makes painting, like life itself, interesting in so far as they bring you closer to yourself. “
Painting to get closer to herself, including all the contradictions that comes with it, touches, in my opinion, the core of Pia’s painting. And perhaps it also explains why her paintings sometimes remind us of patterns and motives that we know from women’s clothing and upholstery from the fifties, at other times refer to a landscape in combination with a monochrome or to human figures positioned behind and in front of bars. Just as a day has different moments and atmospheres – from cheerful, animated and busy to heavy, calm and serene – Pia’s paintings are as varied and contradictory as life itself. Nonetheless, they always rise above the recognizable because of Pia painting familiar subjects in a surprising environment, combining them with unexpected elements. As a result, they become part of a greater whole rather than refer to themselves.
Pia’s paintings stem on the one hand from a personal desire to discover and develop herself as an autonomous artist, and on the other from a deeply cherished desire to keep alive the ideas of her source of inspiration and deceased lover (the greater whole). Her art originates in the “visual friction” both motives create. And this exactly explains why Pia’s art – in combination with her excellent sense of color and accurate touch – is so authentic, original and meaningful.
Her father would be proud of her.
Group exhibitions
1970 Stadhuis, Gouda
2008 Kunstig Platteland, Kantens Groningen
2011 Openateliers Plantage Weesper, Amsterdam
2011 Stedelijk IJburg, Amsterdam
2014 Openateliers Jordaan, Amsterdam
2015 Beeldend Gesproken, Amsterdam
2015 Brooklyn Hotel, Amsterdam
2016 Beeldend Gesproken, Amsterdam
2016 La mairie, La Roquebrou France
2022 (re)Discoveries, Amsterdam
Solo exhibitions
2009 Centraal Buro Parlan, Alkmaar
2011 Amphia, Oosterhout
2014 MC Dudok, Hilversum
2015 Faces, Landscapes and leaves, Amsterdam
2018 Beeldend Gesproken, Amsterdam
2024 La Capitale Galerie, Paris France