Lita van Engelenhoven Artist Page
Le Parfum du Midi, acryl on canvas 70 x 70 cm
© 2024 Lita van Engelenhoven
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Born in Utrecht, The Netherlands, Lita van Engelenhoven has lived and worked in Tiel for more than 20 years. She has developed a personal way of painting. Her paintings offer a silent view on reality. A reality that gives a certain feeling, an atmosphere, a silence. Van Engelenhoven says: "I paint the silent things that surround me".
The way of painting is important. This reflects in the skin of the painting, the intensity and the relationship between the forms and the colours. Years ago painting was also a great physical effort. Now she is sitting at her painter's easel and constructs her paintings, layer over layer, from dark to light. At present it's important for her to paint according to traditional methods; she investigates the way the light falls on the colour, the form and the subject. A new starting point.
Her compositions are set against backdrops executed in colours unique to the artist that are blending with powerful but discrete turquoises, warm browns and yellows.
Because of her attention to the relationship between the forms and the colours she uses, her paintings often show a sensitive and vulnerable atmosphere. Her portraits are a good example of this. Universal portraits, not refering to reality or a certain person. These portraits have a minimum of communication towards the spectator. They keep there own individuality and do not invite to action. The eyes of the spectator can read the portrait as a poem. The portraits are showing a mixture of melancholy and a certain pride.
The spectator seeks the eyes of the portrait and in this way they are starting a dialogue, which can evoke emotions. The face is the place where inside and oudside, man and world, nature and soul meet each other. In this way we are looking to a portrait and go through an emotion.The title of the painting refers to the content rather than to the representation. The painting arises from the world of the artist. He takes the spectator into his world, to show the wealth and variety of that world. The painter takes us to a world which we never knew before. The making of a painting is a cutout of daily life. And when the painting is finished, it feels as if it has existed for ever. Only the maker knows what it was before it found its present form. This process is often a laborious one. The painting brings up questions that need an answer. Sometimes the whole painting changes because of a small addition. It seems there is a certain mystery context between the parts of the painting. "It looks so easy, but nevertheless it feels as if my life depends on it", says the painter about her work.
Paintings of Lita van Engelenhoven are represented in several collections in The Netherlands, Italy, Germany and the USA.
o.a.: ABN/AMRO - ING - PGEM - Ernst & Young
Museum Henriëtte Polak, Zutphen
Gemeente Tiel /The Netherlands | | Studios of Lita van Engelenhoven |
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