Marijke van Seters

Nature often has a beneficial effect, because of the surprising beauty of flowering plants, stately trees and reflecting ponds. To quote Vincent van Gogh, nature (and also art with nature as its subject) can offer us comfort. With this connotation, the paintings and drawings of Marijke van Seters (Nijmegen, 1958) acquire extra meaning and gain all the more power.

What is immediately noticeable in Marijke's works is that they either zoom in very much on a succinct detail of nature, where it seems as if a close-up has been taken, or they approach the landscape from a bird's-eye view with a high horizon. In addition, she has an extensive photo archive as study material and support in determining, among other things, composition and cuts

This immediately explains her admiration for painters such as the impressionist Monet and Japanese printmaking, with their idiosyncratic and original vision of the landscape. Because she also has a penchant for immersing the viewer in nature through strong framing or confronting it with an almost breathtaking panoramic expanse.

The penchant for the decorative never becomes an end in itself: because, for example, the slender branches and flower vines sometimes stick out
boldly and diagonally across the image plane, or are then outlined against the background of a bright backlight, so that their shapes fade and seem to disappear. Or they can only be seen as a reflection, a reflection in the water. By the way, the light effect allows the colors to contrast in a subtle way, which is also the result of patient painting layer upon layer. Due to this transparent structure, like a kind of wings, the viewer is drawn even more into the image and thus into nature.

In her acrylic paint and chalk drawings, she subordinates the topographical to the soft tones with this sensitive layering and the tendency to simplify. The works are stripped of time and place and thus touch even more the essence of the experience of nature. Certainly in a series it is striking how changing moods are evoked with minimal details. Marijke van Seters, for example, touches us with the grandeur or, on the contrary, the intimacy of nature, as a source of inspiration and inspiration.

Edwin Becker
Chief Curator of Exhibitions, Van Gogh Museum