A Compulsion to Create

For Dutch artist Marc Barendse, painting is so much a part of who he is, that he has to find a way to do it regardless of anything else going on in his life

Tucked away in a back room of a warehouse in a tiny Dutch fishing village, artist Marc Barendse brings to life his signature, brightly coloured paintings. He has been interested in art since he was a child, and he would always visit the gallery in the village where he was raised.

In his late teens, he started to be influenced by graffiti. His father would tell him he didn’t care where he did his art, as long as he didn’t catch him doing it on his neighbour’s wall.  “I was always at my desk, drawing, scribbling, doing research and also getting out to see what other people made. I was quite into graffiti in the 80s, but my style has developed to where, if you look at it now, it doesn’t really resemble graffiti although there are still a couple of elements from that era. Over the last 15 years, I’ve also been heavily influenced by the post-WW2 COBRA movement, where artists from Copenhagen (Co), Brussels (Br), Amsterdam (A) started to work together to develop new, spontaneous, colourful ways of making art, abandoning the old styles with the classic painting,” said Barendse.

Barendse doesn’t subscribe to the starving artist trope, instead by day he works for an international organisation, where he makes his living to support his family, and in his free time, he works on his art as his creative outlet. “This studio means my freedom; the core of my existence is to make art,” he said.

When he’s not in his studio, he’ll still scribble in his notes at work, or draw on the table with his finger during dinner, and when he lies in bed he’ll think about the colours he will use in his next painting.

He starts by choosing the material, because he feels it defines the process, whether he chooses to paint on a canvas or a bit of cardboard. He uses different paints but only uses oil paints in the summer, when it dries quickly, and also when it is icy outside, when water-based paint would freeze because he doesn’t have heating in his workroom.

“I sometimes mix the two in the sense that one layer can be water-based and then oil on top. My website is called Marc Unlimited because I have no limitations in how I work. I always start with the background colour. Just like when you have a musical composition for a song, the music sets the scene. It can be a dramatic melody or very uplifting. That’s also what the colours do. The colour defines the atmosphere of the painting,” he said.

He starts with yellow as the lightest colour because other colours can layer over it; blue is his favourite colour to work with. When he sets out the colours, he doesn’t always know exactly what he is going to paint. He’ll start putting the colours onto the canvas and then he’ll go in with the black, which he likens to the lyrics of the song. “So, the shapes can also mean anything. People look at it from their own stories and that’s what I enjoy. It has to feel good. I also have works that I don’t like and then I paint over them again with something new,” he said.

ART AS BUSINESS
One of his favourite memories from years ago was holding an exhibition in a retirement home and one lady approached him and said she really liked one of his paintings and wanted to know what he wanted for it. Her husband had died two weeks prior, so his response was to give it away. “My art is making people happy. My journey is already finished; this is what I want to achieve,” said Barendse.

He’s also really happy to have somebody handle setting up the exhibitions and managing the sales, because “being an artist and running the business side don’t go together. I think that’s true for any creative, whether you’re an artist or designer, or writer. You are producing creative work, you’re not there to run a business. I think it’s important to find the right people to partner with in that respect, so they can focus on the logistics of it.”

How does Barendse keep motivated to paint and keep creating different works? He paints for an hour, maybe an hour and a half and then calls it a day because the paint has to dry. He also works on five or six different pieces at a time. “If you have this inner need to be creative, don’t limit yourself. Being creative is not for other people, it’s for you,” he added.

Get in touch: @marcunlimited