André van Beek
Self-taught post-impressionist painter, born 1947 ·
Picardy, France
A painter's eye on Picardy
André van Beek was born in 1947, to a Dutch father and a French mother. The latter was a music teacher. Self-taught, with a post-impressionist tendency, André van Beek is an artist sensitive to the poetic beauty of the landscapes of his native region, Picardy, which he paints with happiness and sincerity.
His paintings, made up of multiple touches of superimposed and juxtaposed colors, express light, testifying to the emotion that the artist feels before the beauty of nature, to the rhythm of the seasons.
André van Beek's works are known throughout the world, especially in the United States and Japan. He exhibits his works in his gallery.
A canvas built layer by layer
Each painting begins much as the landscape itself begins in nature — the sky first, then the great masses of form, then the water. André works slowly, in superimposed and juxtaposed touches of colour, the same patient method whatever the subject: a Normandy coastline, a garden pond, or a bridge under an evening sky.
The finished work
Painting is not a pastime for André van Beek — it is his life. Every canvas that leaves the easel joins a body of work built over four decades, one patient layer of colour at a time.
He also excels in the delicate and colorful translation of flower gardens, his own, or that of the poet Philéas Lebesgue. He likes to capture the fogs or luminous mists that are born on the mirror of the ponds. The canals lined with trees and flowers of the Hortillonnages d'Amiens are familiar to him. He sometimes seeks the tranquility of the banks of the Seine or the picturesque calm of the small villages of Lower Normandy.