Searching for Realness with Eelke Renschke Bekkenutte

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Hello Eelke, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Before starting, I’d like to go back to the beginnings for a moment: how did you get into art in the first place and how did it evolve from there to “becoming an artist”?

My creative journey began at the age of nine, when I started writing stories and poems. In high school, I discovered photography and felt a profound connection to capturing moments, which allowed me to get closer to life and observe it more intimately. At 17, I was accepted into AKV St. Joost in Breda, where I pursued a degree in photography. During my second year at art school, I chose a minor in painting. This newfound freedom led me to create large paintings, capturing movement and expressions with a sense of joy I hadn’t experienced before.

Throughout my time at art school, I experimented with collage techniques, integrating photography, text, and painting. This exploration continued after graduation. Becoming an artist was a natural progression for me; I knew that it was something I could never abandon. After moving to Rotterdam, I balanced a part-time job with my passion for painting and began showcasing my work through exhibitions, residencies, and funding applications. In 2019, I was honored to receive the Mondriaan Fund for Young Talented Artists in the Netherlands.

You wrote that since the beginning of your artistic path you have been in search of ‘honest’ visual answers to the question “what is life” and that you have been driven to explore what is life through art. Could you please talk more about this, and especially about the two experiences in your life that have sparked that fire?

Yes, since the beginning of my arts I have been in search of ‘honest’ visual answers to the question ‘what is life’. Although I always knew that I would never get an answer to something that was in the essence elusive, I was driven to explore life through art. I wanted to look further than only the perception of the eye and visualise the pure experience of being alive. A longing to get closer to an essence, beginning, source. Since 2012, I have been exploring different media, seeking if there was one that could best capture and translate the invisible, abstract experience of being alive into a visual representation. Which art form might provide an honest visual answer to the question ‘What is life?’.

The root of this never-ending search lies in two experiences from past years. During my study of photography between 2011 and 2015, I started to wonder why the written word and photography are often regarded as the most truthful, honest and common media to communicate about life. Yet, every word can be subject to multiple interpretations, and every photograph is limited by its frame. They both can create a misleading impression of a structured and graspable reality. In truth, life is an infinite and boundless entity, composed of countless elements that cannot be easily grasped or fully captured. This made me want to discover other media in order to open up the area and explore different visual languages that could communicate about life.

The other experience was in 2012 during a tour in an archive in Breda. I was shown a handwritten document dating back to the 600s. The energy of the hand that had penned it seemed perceptible, as if I could travel back in time through the authenticity of the document. It felt as if life was being transferred to me from another human being. I was then informed that the entire archive would be digitized in the coming years. I remember feeling petrified. Same as the old document I was holding would become petrified, which meant to me that the media that have the ability to convey life-energy would be petrified over time.

The digital world feels for me as something that can take away the pureness, the realness and the energy of life. As if there comes a plastic layer over it, which removes the honesty and imperfection that makes life, life and human, human.

These experiences inspired me to create art that would stay as close as possible to the experience of being alive – offering honest visual answers and visualizations. To hold on to media that could convey life energy, from human to human without an artificial layer. Real, imperfect, pure, raw and honest.

Since 2012, I have been exploring various art forms such as painting, mixed media, sculpture, installation, film and performance. Over the past years, most of my work has involved combining different media on canvas, including text, photography and painting.  In these works, the texts represent human thoughts, the photography embodies human seeing and the paint conveys the human expressions and feelings. By integrating these elements into a single visualization it brought me a truthful view of the experience of being alive. However, these works were often perceived as dairy-like fragments of my personal life, which is not my intention. I aim to visualize the raw experience of being alive, rather than showing my own persona. This has recently led me to transition towards abstract painting.

I’d like to stay with the topic of abstract painting. Could talk a bit more about what fascinates you about it?

In abstract painting, I find a language that feels honest to me. Both the creative process and the resulting work closely align with my experience of being alive, bringing me closer to visual answers to the question ‘What is life’. In abstract painting I find room for imperfections and expressions that can capture and transform life-energy. It embraces the unnameable, undefined and abstract aspects of existence.

Painting in abstraction helps me understand and explore what, for me, constitutes the essence of life and the direction I wish to grow towards. Abstraction allows me to delve beneath words, ingrained patterns, judgments, and conditioning. It is a learning journey to return to a kind of beginning, perhaps a core essence. I aim to revisit the pure creative freedom that we experienced as children, when the act of creation was about the process itself rather than the end result.

As adults, it is often difficult to create free from judgments and conditioning. We are frequently interrupted by a voice telling us that our work is not beautiful, which can block our creative flow. This extends beyond painting, as judgments and conditioning often permeate our daily lives, with thoughts that can interrupt our life-flow. Through abstraction, I try to teach myself to break free from these constraints by focusing on the act of creation whenever my mind tries to interfere. This may involve getting so close to the canvas that I lose perspective and follow the lines on a millimeter scale, or painting with my eyes closed. Abstract painting serves as a life-learning journey that helps me explore the nature of life and how I navigate it.

In abstract painting I find room for imperfections and expressions that can capture and transform life-energy. It embraces the unnameable, undefined and abstract aspects of existence.

I wanted to talk with you about your series “The painting that wants to break free from itself”.

My fascination with children’s drawing styles and their boundless creativity has inspired my latest series, “The Painting that Wants to Break Free from Itself.” Over the past six years, I have babysit for three different families, two days a week. I am fascinated by the children’s drawing style and their creations. I remember being amazed by their free and unbounded creativity. When I tried to emulate their approach, I quickly realized that my hand could not reproduce their lines and shapes because it had already been trained and conditioned. I began to observe them closely: their faces near the paper, following the point of their pencil as if the pencil had his own will and decided where to go. They are not thinking about the whole, they are in it. Completely immersed in the process of creating. It’s not their head that draws but their hand. What makes their drawings pure, raw, unexpected and at the same time concentrated and full of life.

The new series, titled “The painting that wants to break free from itself”, explores the journey of unlearning and creative freedom. These series paintings are the results of a beginning technique in ‘unlearning’ I started to develop some months ago inspired by children’s art-making processes. This is a continuation in my search for ‘honest’ visual answers to the question ‘What is life’ and my attempts to visualize the experience of being alive.

As I mentioned in a previous response, painting is a life-learning process for me, through which I aim to free myself from judgments and conditions. This series focuses more intently on that aspect of my work, as I strive to delve deeper into ‘honesty,’ ‘beginning,’ ‘purity,’ and ‘freedom’ through abstract painting. The title of the series reflects this sentiment, as while creating these pieces, I felt as though the paintings wanted to break free from themselves. The strokes and forms seemed to dance or escape from the canvas, unwilling to be confined by my ideas or thoughts. It was as if the paint, colors, lines, and shapes all yearned to break free.

A question I always ask all of the artists I interview is about their creative process. Would you mind sharing some of that with me, how you get from the starting point to a finished piece or series?

My artistic approach involves an interplay between control and coincidence. Taking distance to observe and react from intuition. I work without a premeditated end image. I attempt to let go of my head and slip into my body to transfer life energy into the materials on the canvas. By working on various pieces at the same time I aim to make the process a flexible play, transferring movement into the strikes of the brushes. I work with different layers and paint surface over surface connected to the natural processes of perish and growth, creation and destruction. Trying to connect with the pure experience of being alive and making this visible.

As previously mentioned, my recent work integrates the technique of ‘unlearning,’ with a focus on letting go of control, liberating oneself from judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly,’ and releasing the tendency to create an end image. To make it all about creating itself and nothing more.

The following text shows a part of this technique I am writing on, offering insight into how I integrate it into my artistic process: “Follow the brush and colors to the millimeter. Immerse yourself in the matter or form as much as possible. Look at every piece that turns nothing into something, every bristle of the brush that makes something appear. Zoom in like a child. Look no further than 1 cm ahead when the color and shape emerge. Let your eyes close occasionally while your hands continue to create. Attempt to connect with the experience of being alive, whatever it is or means. If possible, go beyond the person. Try to forget about the person ‘You are’ who has a name, thoughts, feelings, opinions. Hold the pencil, brush or marker in your hand in a way that feels strange. Vary from the amount of one till more brushes or pencils in your hand. Play. Let the pencils tell their stories, let the brushes create their dance. Invite coincidence. Create till you stop”.

You said before that the digital world feels to you like something that can take away the pureness, the realness and the energy of life. As if there comes a plastic layer over it, which removes the honesty and imperfection that makes life, life and human, human. Could you please speak a bit more about that?

When I look around I feel the growing obsession with perfection. Instagram or other social media channels showing the ‘perfect’ lifestyles and faces filled with botox. Pursuing happiness and beauty standards in unreal images. We are expecting the best of the best and putting a high pressure on our beings. Consequences as burnouts, stress and depressions are surrounding us. The longing for perfection and unreal standards are making us sick and tired instead of feeling alive.

This evokes a burning flame inside me which encourages me to continue my search for ‘honest’ visual answers to the question ‘What is life’ and to further my attempts to visualize the raw experience of being alive. To get as close as possible on the skin of existence that lays beyond all the bla, bla, bla*.

This is one of the motives why my new series of paintings and the developing technique are dedicated to unlearning. Learn to unlearn through art. Aims to let go of ideas, conditions and standards through creating. To search for ‘ultimate’ creative freedom. Because here hides an opportunity to detach from nowadays pressure and therefore to get a more direct access to the core of existence.

Also the need to keep on creating art with real materials, in a growing digital world feels important to me. To keep us reminded that we are made from flesh and blood instead of filters and fillers. To convey life energy through painting, where you can feel the touch of a real human who made it, who went through a process with ups and downs, a fight, a dance, not perfect but real. In contrast to the almost unreal perfection digital art can create where the unique ‘hand’ of the maker, to my opinion, disappears.

Although I want to emphasize that I am not against digital art. I definitely see the good and beautiful sides in it. But for myself I feel called to stay on working with real materials and embracing the imperfections that make life honest and real for me.

Also the need to keep on creating art with real materials, in a growing digital world feels important to me. To keep us reminded that we are made from flesh and blood instead of filters and fillers.

Could you put into words how painting makes you feel?

Painting makes me feel alive, as if I am flying high in the sky and at the same time digging deep in the earth, immersed in the ever-changing stream of experiences and emotions. It can evoke a wide range of feelings—happiness and sadness, energy and fatigue, love and anger and everything else we tend to experience in human life. Painting allows me to feel all of it but also teaches me to not get attached to it. Like meditating can help to observe and see that you are not your thoughts or feelings. That everything comes and goes. Painting makes me feel free.

Any advice you’ve been given as an emerging artist that you’d like to share with fellow artists?

I’d recommend finding your own creative rhythm, even if it means taking breaks from making art for months at a time. Embrace the idea that everything is part of the creative process, including walking, doing nothing, and staring at the sky. Fill yourself with new experiences, no matter how small or grand. Remember that there’s no right or wrong way to create—just your own unique path. Trust in what you do and don’t be afraid. Beauty and ugliness are merely concepts, so create what you genuinely feel or desire. A quote that inspired and motivated me during art school came from artist Marinus Boezem, who said during a studio visit, “Nobody is waiting for what you are making, so PLEASE do what makes you happy.”

Any upcoming project/event that you’d like to draw attention to?

Nothing is scheduled yet, but I recently applied for the Future Generation Art Prize 2023 and the Mondriaan Fund Project. Keep an eye on my Instagram page or website for updates!

Are there any fellow emerging artists you’d like to recommend?

Yes, I would like to recommend Martha Jungwirth, Roy Aurinko, Marria Pratts, Tracy Emin and Lotte Wieringa.

And last question, and that is as in all of our interviews: What are your hopes for the future?

To keep on creating and spreading creativity, life-energy, freedom and play into the world.

Thank you so much for the interview and for inviting me to your studio!