Landscape and memory

Travel magnifies your moments of looking.

Painting landscapes in her studio, the Amsterdam artist Ditte Brouwers re-experiences and intensifies these heightened visual experiences. Oil-painting for her means applying layers and adopting a measured approach to colour quantity and composition.
An outline is painted, then erased with the next layer, in the search for the right, dramatic and personal setting. Demolishing and constructing, stripping away, over and over: it is a long process. “But this way” she herself says, “you get closest to the skin of the earth, to the character of the land and to the remembered experience”.

So a painting of an Italian subject becomes quite different in character from a painting of the polder landscape around Amsterdam: Brouwers’ beloved scenes of Marken, Durgerdam and Botshol.

These landscapes show traces of human activity; lines run across the wide stretches of reclaimed land, seemingly an embodiment of arcadian land-management, but a scene from which people themselves are absent. The landscapes are self-sufficient.

These have become intensely experienced paintings, highly personal and with a soul of their own.

The soul of the land is most emphatically expressed in the recent dune series. The Dutch dunes retain the memory of oppression; this landscape has become uncomfortable, because it is penetrated by the past. The wind-twisted thickets and the white trees tell the story of the war. The traces of what took place all those years ago have been covered up. It is a covered landscape; but it still has its silent witnesses.

In the series Innerground a new depth underlies Ditte Brouwers’ love of life and optimism. The paintings mark an interiorizing, an awareness of the horrors that have taken place, there in the dunes.

Translation: Anthony Paul