by Jeannette Berndsen
I RECEIVED a message from my great teacher in art. Years ago I had struggled with a technical problem and contacted him. And now, years later, he’s the one who made the contact. Of course, in my school years I had drawing lessons, but never before had I had someone like Niek. This one sign of life – and right away a world of memories opens up.
I have always been drawing, at age 7 my mother had to come to school. The teacher made mom look at a number of sketches lying next to each other. She told her that my drawings always stood out in the brightness of colors, she thought that was very special. My mother didn’t tell me this until she was already elderly. No way she wanted to encourage art.
When I was 14, the art teacher wanted to send one of my drawings to a competition. That didn’t happen eventually, but the drawing survived. When I was 15, I went alone by bus to Arnhem, to the Museum of Modern Art, then Gemeente Museum Arnhem. Paid for with money earned as a babysitter. And when I was 16, I sketched The Beatles from the Muziek Expres which I bought regularly, all drawn on blank newsprints which my father brought home. I always sketched on the margins of newspapers and magazines.
When I turned 30, my husband asked what I wanted for my birthday. He gave me a painting box with oil paints and little canvases. Promptly I got to work and made mostly some surrealist art, after all I was a Dali fan. After a while I saw an advertisement in the newspaper and so I ended up with my new teacher, Niek Nagengast in Oosterbeek, once a week.
HE HAD a very personal style of teaching. I had said I did not want to paint a still life, because only the French have the perfect words for it, “nature morte”, indeed as dead as anything. From the first evening he put something dead or almost dead in front of me. I said nothing, but sank my teeth into it. After a year and a half of still lifes, two fish, a picture of Princess Beatrix and Claus in the woods, and more dead stuff, I understood that this is actually an excellent teaching tool. You learn to “look,” which is perhaps the most important rule.
He came up with all kinds of methods, and to this day I enjoy the color knowledge and all the other tricks to achieve the desired result. Never before have I had such fun lessons, together with half a dozen or so other students, with background music that was incredibly special and beautiful in creating a pleasant atmosphere. On one of the final evenings, he said that I might go in a completely different direction.
Niek had seen that correctly. It took a few more years, and then there emerged the first graphic impressionism. Incidentally, this happened at the Museum of Modern Arts in Arnhem, where I was allowed to paint for three days in the Rhine Room. I ended up there after winning a competition, for amateurs who had to paint an object of the Arnhem Open Air Museum. I didn’t dare use oil paint, in that beautiful room with its marble floor and a stunning view of the Rhine. I used pastels for it and every day the museum’s director Liesbeth Brandt Corstius came to see me and she loved what I did.
Niek Nagengast, you were absolutely right. I went in a very individual direction, and you saw that very well.
* Jeannette Berndsen is an artist in West Palm Beach, Florida.
