Christopher Hickey

Spode

Scott French "Strength, sensitivity and beauty are the landmarks that inspire my landscapes-- wide open spaces, no matter how small the image. By conveying the mysteries of these rev...

Chris Liberti is a favorite with collectors here and abroad. Gesture, color, and surface enliven the new harmonies and patterns Liberti creates as he works, generating a distinct bac...

The Canary and the Dragon by Ginny Williams is a richly imagined oil painting on panel, measuring 24 x 24 inches. In this expressive, narrative-driven piece, Williams weaves symbolis...

Rein Pol Cello 93 x 120 cm ( Frame is included 107 x 134 cm) Oil on wood panel, 1987 Looking at Rein Pol's work, it is first and foremost striking that the artist's subjects are very diverse. However, he was mainly known for his paintings 'with trains'. If you look further, you will see that Rein Pol has many sources of inspiration about which he can tell 'stories in paint'. On the website of the Classical Academy in Groningen there is a beautiful teacher portrait of Rein Pol, the first part of this text comes from that site: The fact that Rein Pol made paintings with trains in them gave him the stigma of being a train painter. The 'Blue Angel' is just one of many, often autobiographical, subjects in his paintings. This also applies to nature, landscape, persons and objects from his immediate environment, in which transience is an underlying theme. “As a child I was always drawing. The profession of art teacher appealed to me. It never occurred to me that I could become a painter.' At the Minerva Academy, teachers such as Ger Siks and Matthijs Röling impressed him. Their influence is still noticeable in his paintings: the atmospheric of Röling and the alienating of Siks. After the academy Rein briefly taught at a secondary school. "Not an unqualified success! So when I was asked to come and teach at Minerva, I seized the opportunity with both hands. I have learned a lot myself from teaching academy students.' A violin on fire, a train soaring to heaven, Romance at its best! The passion is in the details, the feathers of a dead bird, the drops on a misty mirror. And that passion is what Romanticism is all about. Rein Pol has been working professionally as a painter since 1976. He always has a keen eye for the expressiveness of the apparently insignificant detail. Every theme that Pol paints is depicted in a clear, harmonious composition with great attention to light, texture, spatial and color effects. The paintings are not intended as an exact copy of the reality around us, but as a representation of our own reality! Hans van Seventer previously wrote: “The subjects of Rein Pol's paintings move between the ordinary and the absurd. He paints musical instruments as well as a bottle containing the fetus of a pig. Sometimes the smell of manure rises from his landscapes, then again a Groningen bum toils along the steep banks of a Norwegian fjord. His self-portraits form a collection in themselves: in the mirror of the bathroom, in a glass display case surrounded by 'gohst of the past', or simply with a jar of pickles as a sign of his dignity”. With his work Pol is counted among the Northern Figuratives. Rein Pol exhibits a lot in the Netherlands. Abroad he exhibited in Germany, Norway, Poland, Switzerland and Indonesia. With the so-called Zwiggelte Group in France, the United States, Canada and Australia. Much of the painter's work is included in private collections. His paintings are also in the possession of, among others, the Drents Museum in Assen, the Smallingerland Museum in Drachten, the Free University of Amsterdam, the ING Collection and the Philips Collection...