Who am I?

Hans Barends (December 4th 1944 Leiden, the Netherlands) is a Dutch visual artist, a colourist pur sang. He is well known for his oil paintings in abstract impressionistic poetic sensitive style and his figurative art. During his carrier he switched to more expressionistic painting. He graduated at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

Hans Barends graduated at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Because of his independence, he has developed various transitions in style over the years. In the beginning he developed his individuality through a series of stone still-lives inspired by the figurative abstract work of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, June 20, 1890 - 1964). In the early eighty’s he produced his first large colorful oil paintings with a length sometimes more then 2 meters.

Hans Barends is born in Leiden and lived there for the most part of his life. He travelled a lot and got a lot of inspiration from all the different cultures. Later he moved to Spa Belgium into "Villa des Gladieul" with a lovely park and rose garden.

At the Royal academy of Art in The Hague, he had lessons from, among others, Rein Drayer, a sensitive man with a very poetic Dutch way of looking at things and in his way, as sober as possible. Also Baljeu who, our adolescents, informed about the existence of modern currents. And of course, you are also shaped by the environment where you are, and by your fellow students.

What can you say about your need to paint ... “The best is actually expressed by the painter Terpentijn. A figure created by Maarten Toonder; It is about the "vibration of the “eh ......... things". Yes, it is better not to say. Happy making spatial presence of everything. And then capture that 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional canvas. And if the literal rendering of it is done too often, it has become too superfluous, then in a language of form that omits it. I do, however, need to make oil paint sketches to nature. That wonderful contact. That presence of things. In the "couleur locale" with paint to be fixed. Fernando Pessoa said it a bit nicer”:

Sometimes, on days of perfect and very sharp light.

What things are as real as they can be,

I ask myself slowly

Why I give beauty

To the things.

A flower, for example, has that beauty?

Is there beauty in a fruit?

No, they have colour and shape

And they do not exist anymore.

Beauty is the name of something that does not exist

And that I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me.

He means nothing.