User:Funk newman/sandbox

Jan Beekman Artist
First Period: 1945 – 1960

Fire under Ashes

Jan Beekman grew up during the horrors of World War II and the huge philosophical and political struggle, which followed. His student years at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts exposed him to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the existential movement of Sartre, the humanism of Camus, and the theories of Marx and Freud. Finally, with the 20th Congress in Moscow, came the fall of Stalinism. These were the influences which formed him as a man and as an artist, and which have continued to inform his work. From his very beginning as an artist Beekman made a series of choices to which he remained faithful in the decades that followed; these were expressed in the fact that Nature became not just the central theme but the very impetus of his work. Until the mid-eighties the few areas in Flanders, region of his birth, that had remained relatively unspoiled by industrialization and modernization were his main source of inspiration. As a modernist, however, he refuted realism and the principles of classic landscape painting, even to the limited extent that they had survived in early modernist movements such as Impressionism and Cubism. “I strove for suggestion, not imitation” says Beekman and, explaining his rejection of classic illusionary techniques such as perspective: “I took the canvas for what it was: a flat surface”.