Jacqueline Wouters
Inspiration
Jacqueline Wouters was born in Mijdrecht. As a child, she played a lot outdoors in nature but also on the premises of her grandfather, who owned a demolition company and a steel company. The company specialized in making industrial truck bodies and containers, etc.
She played a lot in the large shed with stored corten steel beams, pipes, barrels, and a lot of demolition material from old houses, factories, and, among others, an old station in Mijdrecht.
Jacqueline loves the direct geometric shapes of steel pipes, chains, iron beams, barrels, wheels, tires, etc. She is also fascinated by the architecture of factory buildings. The tall chimneys, the play of lines. The division of surfaces.
Asia
In recent years, Jacqueline has traveled extensively through Asia. She practices yoga, meditation, and qigong, and thus seeks harmony and beauty, the aesthetic, simplicity.
Her sources of inspiration are the simplicity of Asian artworks, Japanese prints, calligraphy. The Japanese formal language/patterns. The Asian way of working, from meditation and concentration. The Zen philosophy behind these works, the directness, brushwork, craftsmanship, spirituality, lightness, layering, the meditative aspect, the cosmos, nature. In Zen, a form is truly a form; all superfluous elements are omitted.
She aims to give the clear geometric forms a new experience, a transformation, stemming from the simplicity of the Asian way of working. Painting as meditation, an inner journey. Ultimately, everything is energy, which transforms into matter, including industrial forms.
Her work
The work is 2-dimensional and is built from geometric shapes/objects such as circles, ovals, lines, tubes, spheres. These shapes can be open or closed, industrial or organic.
The work is rhythmic, subdued, and has an expressive or graphic character. Jacqueline works with acrylic and oil paint, but usually, the first layer is acrylic or watercolor.
While painting, she seeks contrasts: the use of color ranges from sober to very colorful, the paint can be opaque or very transparent, glossy or matte. But also soft lines versus clear, sharp forms. The size is small to medium.
Method
Beforehand, Jacqueline makes sketches on paper, or she uses her own photos of various abstract shapes and tubes. She cuts out pictures from magazines with certain patterns, rhythms. With these ingredients, she creates a composition and determines the color scheme. Then Jacqueline begins with the 1st layer on MDF or canvas. Followed by a 2nd layer. What happens when you apply a transparent layer over a thick layer of paint? What is the effect of colors next to or over each other? Sometimes beautiful accidental shapes and negative spaces emerge.
The use of stencils ensures that the shapes remain clear and sharp. Jacqueline uses acrylic because it dries quickly, oil paint as a 2nd layer because its color is beautiful, and to easily create "flowing" movements/forms. To allow one color to blend into another and watercolor because it is transparent, and as a contrast (thin, transparent).
The constants that repeatedly appear are the abstract forms such as circles, ovals, tubes, lines. You never see a horizon in her work.