Jacqueline Wouters
Inspiration
Jacqueline Wouters was born in Mijdrecht. As a child, she often played outdoors in nature but also on the premises of her grandfather, who owned a demolition and steel company. The company specialized in manufacturing industrial truck bodies and containers, among other things.
She often played in the large shed where corten steel beams, pipes, barrels, and a lot of demolition material from old houses, factories, and even an old station in Mijdrecht were stored.
Jacqueline loves the direct geometric forms of steel pipes, chains, iron beams, barrels, wheels, tires, etc. She is also fascinated by the architecture of factory buildings. The tall chimneys, the interplay of lines. The division of surfaces.
Asia
In recent years, Jacqueline has traveled extensively through Asia. She practices yoga, meditation, and qigong, and therefore seeks harmony and beauty, aesthetics, 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, the cosmos, nature. In Zen, a form is truly a form; all superfluous elements are omitted.
She wants to give new meaning to the clear geometric forms, a transformation, rooted in the simplicity of the Asian way of working. Painting as meditation, an inward journey. Ultimately, everything is energy that transforms into matter, including industrial forms.
Her Work
The work is 2-dimensional and composed of geometric shapes/objects such as circles, ovals, lines, pipes, 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 color palette 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 ranges from small to medium.
Methodology
Beforehand, Jacqueline makes sketches on paper, or she uses her own photos of various abstract shapes and pipes. She cuts out pictures from magazines with specific patterns and rhythms. With these ingredients, she creates a composition and determines the color scheme. Then Jacqueline starts 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 of its beautiful color and to easily create "flowing" movements/forms, allowing one color to blend into another, and watercolor because it is transparent and provides a contrast (thin, transparent).
The constants that repeatedly appear are abstract forms such as circles, ovals, pipes, lines. You never see a horizon in her work.