Reclining nude
wood, 80x230x75 cm
2017
There is an exhibition of works by Toon Kelder in Flehite museum. The painter is shown here as a romantic modernist. On the Internet he is classified under The Hague School and the New Hague School, but expressionism and abstract work is also applicable to him. It is known that he often changed his style, he always wanted to renew himself.
You can see the versatility in the exhibition. His subjects come straight from life. A seascape from a Spanish landscape and gypsy. Café terraces and interiors and an orchestra. There is a remarkable number of female nudes, mature with full breasts and hips, sometimes exaggeratedly out of proportion. I make a comparison with the reclining nudes of Modigliani. Kelder painted his females with an increasingly bleached-out effect, almost luminous and more blurred, like late Turners, dissolving into the background.
A great big tree stands on the canal behind the museum. It is a construction made in 2012 from a huge amount of scrap wood and bears the name ‘Houtleven’ or ‘Wooden Life’. The recycled art was created by two local artists Marisja Smit and Thijs Trompert, who constructed the wooden tree on site, using a large number of screws and nails. At the end of 2016 and into early 2017, I have been stacking the wood rests in my workshop, on my inspiration from what I saw in Flehite.