The work of the Amsterdam artist Jan Maris is special and very recognizable. The situations he paints are recognisable, but also his own developed style and choices he makes in this regard. This makes him an interesting artist from the first moment you see the work.
His fantastic technique, his own subjects and his own style. A picturesque and perhaps also a melancholic one, but in any case a spacious one. His work offers space in a literal and figurative sense. You can wander in the work and let your own imagination run wild.
Deserted streets, alleys, buildings. Always a play of light and shadow. Shapes and surfaces, reflections of light on the stones, shadows and colors. Particularly atmospheric and spacious, very detailed and yet loosely painted. The artist likes to base his work on 'the real'.
As he says himself:
I find it interesting how fragments of an image, converted into brush strokes, can form an extremely recognizable whole. The creative process consists of choosing the object, determining the crop, arranging, omitting and sometimes adding elements, and converting all this into paint.
He is known for the aforementioned streets, squares and cityscapes. Perhaps less known are the still lifes that now belong to our collection. In those still lifes, the Amsterdam artist tells a story, a story about artists, but just as much a story about form, composition and color. Perhaps in that sense such a story is also the story about the artist 'Jan Maris' himself.
