I prefer to be in the last trainwagon: Viewing the landscape I just passed through, as if I’m allowed to relive the past again.
Ben Okri, Nigerian writer, philosopher and ardent traveller
Okri’s retrospective approach towards traversing a landscape is basically how I translate my travel observations into art. During all my journeys to the Himalayan region the landscape experiences were the point of focus.
The experience of the immensity and the expanding emptiness urged me to proceed, looking for new places, even more quiet and empty.
Alone or accompanied by a friend I crossed on foot or by truck through Nepal, Bhutan, Ladakh, Central-Tibet, West-Tibet, Aksai Chin and Xinjiang, gathering visual input for my work. To catch the feeling of that unlimited and borderless space within a framework is untenable. It is an illusion to express space and emptiness in lines and colours. The evocation of that illusion is like a game, wherein the rules are being determined by the applied techniques. The graphic artwork is inspired by all the images I acquired. The pictures of mountain ranges, plains, mountain slopes, and masses of stone and sand, are combined, enlarged, condensed, transformed and dissected, until the creation reflects the tranquillity and enchantment of the specific location. I then relive my travel experiences from a different perspective: Through the rear window in the last train wagon.
Jeanet Snijders
Graphic artwork
click on the image to enlarge
Do not restrict your research to people alone, if you want to discover the truth in a simple manner, but extend it to animals and plants, in short to every living being. And let us then, considering all this, if it is true that something can only originate from its opposite, in case everything has an opposite, as for example beauty has ugliness as an opposite, right has wrong, and many other things, let us then consider whether it is a necessity, that everything that has an opposite can only arise from its opposite.
Socrate (470 – 400 BC) in: Plato, Phaidon, 399 BC
Images are limitations.
Piet Mondriaan, 1920