Artist Saskia Boelsums shows the beauty of the Dutch landscape with her painting-like photos. In the retrospective exhibition ‘Saskia Boelsums – Love for landscape’ in Museum JAN in Amstelveen we see turbulent fields of clouds, cows in the mist and views of the sea. In the post-processing process, Boelsums translates these landscape photos into her own reality, which feels impressionistic and poetic.
“Everything comes together in my landscapes – what I like, what I like to do, what I’ve learned, where my heart is. I feel like an artist with a camera.” This brings us straight to the core of the work of Saskia Boelsums (Amstelveen, 1960). What do we see? Photos reminiscent of paintings. Because Boelsums creates its own reality. She takes pictures of landscapes that fascinate her, and then spends weeks, sometimes months, editing them. Pixel by pixel.
Boelsums works as a painter would, for example emphasizing shadows and highlights and blurring parts to emphasize something else. Similarities with the watercolors by Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch, the cloud paintings by John Constable and the landscapes by the painters of the Barbizon School are unmistakable.
After studying at Academy Minerva in Groningen, Boelsums made 3D installations, often together with writer and visual artist Peter Veen. Since 2013, she has devoted herself entirely to photography. She ‘came to landed’ outside, as it were, through still lifes and portraits. People or traces of people hardly occur in them; that makes her landscapes so pleasant to look at.
Boelsums grew up partly in Iran and Curaçao. The Netherlands became a kind of ‘promised land’. Following Jan Wolkers, who first immersed himself in nature and then started painting, Boelsums also wanted to translate her ‘outdoor feeling’ into her art. The weather and the light are everything; stormy weather produces the most beautiful images.
1 July to 25 September 2022 in Amstelveen
www.museumjan.nl