In an old gym on the Travertijnstraat, close to the Vinkhuizen and De Held districts, you can find several studios of young Groningen artists. In one of those workspaces we meet Klaas Jonkman (1990), who studied in Utrecht, Ghent and Sydney and obtained his master's degree in painting from the Frank Mohr Institute in 2016.
"I'm here five or six days a week, preferably as much as possible. I always get up early, around six or seven, and then I go to the gym. Then on to the studio until about ten o'clock when I'm done and I'm going to clean everything again It's all very rhythmic lately, but it works. At first I went to my studio every day, but after a while I realized it was good to take a break every now and then Thanks to the award of the Mondriaan Fund, I can now fully concentrate on my work. In addition, I try to chill out and not take too much of my work home. Eat, sleep, paint, repeat, that's a bit.
The selection for Art Rotterdam is known, so I am now 'checking' those works. That means I sit down with a cup of coffee and watch it until my eyes fall out. Sometimes you are not really distanced from your own work, then you are too involved in it. Previously I rammed off a canvas in one go, but it helps to put works aside for a while and look at them again, slide them and turn them around. This open approach often results in the best works. If you have too much of a fixed final image in your head, then something is going wrong with me. Continuing to challenge and surprise yourself is important to me.
To me, paintings are illusionary spaces, where brushstrokes are stacked like gestures and together can eventually form an image. I am investigating the role of light in my work, and how I always want to suggest a certain space or a tension within it. As with the Fireflies series, there the light seems to come from within instead of the light coming theatrically from the outside, as with the human, plant and bird figures I painted earlier. Those fireflies, for example, can also be seen in real life in very short, fleeting moments. The nice thing about painting is that you can translate all kinds of viewing moments and memories to the canvas and add a certain structure to it.
I am someone who really has to start from the material itself. In my more abstract work I am investigating: why do I paint, what is a viewing experience for example and how does that work? To investigate that, I now make my own paint, using different pigments and oils. That process is even getting a little chemical, but now I feel like I'm finally getting it under control. I still go to the art store, but I am also often enough in the hardware store to see what types of paint there are and what you can do with it. I've always gotten the most out of that. In my head I now have my own kind of light meter to determine how you can create tension with light, in search of interesting combinations. And after being busy for a while it suddenly becomes magic and you forget for a moment that it is paint on a canvas."
The space in which an artist works is a place where people plod, plan and measure day in, day out. Where a creative product is created and where people think. In this series, visit Groningen artists at their workplace. What are they currently working on? What does their working day look like? And what do they do to relax?
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