| The light outside the open window is alluring; it smoulders behind the multi-coloured stained glass, it radiates through the interior and pulls the viewer’s attention towards its source. Flip Gaasendam has become the lantern bearer of the great masters, because for them, too, light was the inspiration of all things. But Gaasendam has literally added his own radiance to this. With a free, impressionistic touch and a very personal poetry, Gaasendam occupies a striking place among the Northern Figurativists.
Flip Gaasendam frequently paints people waiting at the railroad station restaurant in Groningen. There are plenty of “models” among travellers, coming and going, who get themselves a cup of coffee, unplanned and unposed, and are immortalized by the artist. Gaasendam has become a master of this. With several deft strokes he sets down precisely the essentials of the person, where less talented painters would require days. But a model who poses in a studio divulges more of himself. If everything “clicks” between model and artist, an interaction develops during the process of posing through which the psychological dimension of the painting can be deepened.
Flip Gaasendam has been working for some time with Maja, a red-head from Groningen who really appears to be a muse to him. Gaasendam has painted numerous canvases portraying Maja in a kimono. Not under the illusion that he is evoking a real geisha, because there are no red-haired geishas. The kimono merely accentuates the mystical side of the new model, who has inspired the painter to a collection of exceptionally inspired paintings.
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