Rob van Hoek - Fascinating - layered - mixed media "night landscape" - signed - Sold

• Rob van Hoek lives and works in The Hague, born in 1957

For years I have been inspired by the landscape. And I mean mainly cultivated landscape. With wild and rugged, however beautiful that may be, I can't do much in my work.
Patterns, lines, rhythm, surfaces, but also fallow, green, ripe, mown fields, a row of trees along the road or a lonely tree in a field; the cultural landscape is my greatest source of inspiration.
And of course the horizon and the spectacle above, which largely determines the space and the atmosphere.
On the canvas I apply about 5 to 6 layers of base paint with a brush, in such a way that a nice structure of brush strokes is created. It is quite time-consuming, but adds a lot to the painting in terms of atmosphere. The painting itself is done with transparent oil paint in different layers. Instead of applying paint very precisely with a brush, I often work the other way around: I apply a lot of paint and then very precisely polish and scrape this layer away again. This can be done with a brush, but also with a cloth, kitchen paper, cotton swabs, the back of a brush, or whatever is suitable to get the right lines, shapes or strokes.
Under the term “Songlines”, I work from the following concept: All the titles of my paintings are sentences (or parts of them) from song lyrics. Mostly from pop music, but also suitable jazz titles, or whatever. It is unbelievable how often there is a reference to the landscape, the weather, the time of day, the time of year etc. These are wonderful titles to work from, to add to a painting or afterwards. The term “Songlines” is also a half-serious reference to the book with that title by Bruce Chatwin, in the Dutch translation “De Gezongen Aarde”.