Author Archives: erik

Winterthur, Switzerland

18y.180cm.66kg – 5’11″.145lbs

New here and very curious.

Come from Winti not out yet. Looking for people who know this place and know where it happens.

soot and spit on insert from women’s stocking package.

coated paper, cardboard, animal feed bag, paper, string, braided yarn, soot , spit, wax crayon

blue wax, stick-applied lines on wax-coated cardboard from frozen-pie carton

soot, spit, collage on found paper.

soot and spit on flattened matchbox tray

Source: Lynne Cooke in Artforum, december 2009

- If a poem is too long, make it longer

- If a painting is too colourful, add color.

- If your shots look too amateuristic, you shouldn’t edit.

- If a meeting is boring, stay.

- Never judge an artist on his work.

- Don’t think when you talk.

- Never try to tell what’s on your mind through art, that’s what friends are for.

- Don’t be fooled by the future, it’s just the past in reverse.

- Real art can only exist when Art is banned.

Keren Cytter
in Metropolis M, no. 3-2009

When I started my series of Petit Paradis drawings it was my idea to make a drawing every day, using the stuff around me as inspiration, my clothes, things in my room. I did manage for some time to continue making drawings a day, like a visual diary. Since a few years blogging began slowly to surpass drawing, doing now almost a post a day. (at the beginning of my drawing project I was not even logged on anywhere and blogs were still called weblogs)

That’s why I was excited to see an artist from the 18th century who already did a visual diary, making drawings of the actual life that surrounded him. Christiaan Andriessen (1775-1846) lived in Amsterdam with his family, working as a teacher at the Academy. In his daily sketches he gives intimate accounts of the simple domestic life of his family, the vanity fair on the streets, the music salon concerts; giving a glimpse of things you never see in classic 18th century art.

Another thing that you notice in his drawings is the absence of any moralistic or didactic agenda. I think he saved that for his job as a teacher. There is a lot of peeping though windows going on (and camera obscura) and there is a strange, almost comical scene where the supposed rape of one of the maids is acted out, (une liaison dangereuse?) all standard fare of the century’s lore, but it has nothing of William Hogarth‘s satire or even wit. He may be closer to Samuel Pepys.

In the tiny handwriting that accompanies most of the drawings Andriessen writes simply descriptions of what’s going on but sometimes there are also snippets of dialogue, which adds to the vividness of the scenes. But he also makes good use of his drawing skills by using claire obscure to dramatic effects (a heavy fog going through the streets almost foreshadows a Rene Daniels painting)

Not one of Andriessen’s official paintings has survived and according to some of the prelimary sketches he made that does not seem a big loss. The models he used for them were saved though, as they are the protagonists of many of his sketches, showing the rarely seen moments in the lives of the naked civil servants of the day.

For three years, between 1805-1808, Christiaan kept his dairy every day. There seems to be a lack of continuation from 1806, when there are only a few drawings a year, but perhaps the rest just did not survive. A large selection of the drawings are now being exhibited in the Amsterdam City Archive but, more special, there is the amazing Christiaan Andriessen databank , with all the sketches digitally displayed.

So finally Andriessen’s work can be viewed as the blog it could have been (though you can not leave comments there yet).