ARTISTIC BACKGROUND
Born in Den Hague, The Netherlands 1952
New Zealand, citizen 1965
Lessons in oil painting, with Nick Stein 1963
In 1971 received a Diploma in Graphic Design, (With Merit) at the Christchurch Polytech. In 1972 I studied at the School of Fine Art, University Of Canterbury, achieving high marks but left the following year to paint fulltime. I started exhibiting, my painting tutor, Dick Lovell-Smith purchased five of my paintings at the time. In 1974, I won the Royal Overseas League Award for painting (Art History professor, John Simpson, was the judge). My painting was exhibited in London in 1975. I travelled to Europe in 1978, and exhibited a painting in The Netherlands Royal Academy show, in Roermond. I studied Rembrandt, Mondrian and other artists work in galleries throughout Holland. I continued painting and exhibiting, I was briefly involved in puppetry and theatre on my return. Notably in 1989, I was awarded a QE2 direct support grant, and in 1991, I exhibited this work at the McDougall Art Annex, Christchurch. In 2003, The Te Papa Museum, Wellington purchased Life Spiral. In 2006 Real Art Road Show Purchased and toured Two of my Paintings. Then in 2008 my first public sculpture Stele was unveiled in Temuka. In April 2009, I won first prize in The Peters Doig, Marlborough Art Society Art Awards, for my painting The Iconoclast

Wilhelmus C Ruifrok


SIX PAINTINGS

I am currently working on Six paintings, they are at various stages of completion. Two of the paintings are specifically designed around the figure, showing the visceral structures of the muscles and at times the skeletal under- pinnings. The reason and emotive direction for these works revolves around the search for the immortal and the relationship to the mortal, physical and corporeal world that we live in. The idea is that, if you look closely at the mysterious physical structure you might uncover the spirit that motivates, not only the body of the creature, but the environment in which it lives.
Modern science has pointed out that all elements present on earth and in the universe at large, are created inside stars, larger stars produce heavier elements like carbon and iron and ultimately one of the heaviest elements uranium.*
This established fact. ( discovered less than seventy years ago) opens up the idea that indeed perhaps if light were compressed, as a form of energy, this could produce matter ( ie the physical world) E = M c 2 . We think of light as being of light nature. The opposite of this is the heavy entrapped nature of matter. Complicated by this, is the fact that matter more than light is subject to time, in fact matter is entrapped by time. Light on the other hand, from our perspective, travels almost instantaneously and represents ideas of freedom and even notions close to immortality.
In 1945 the first nuclear bomb was exploded. This proved beyond doubt that heavier elements separated into two lighter elements released primal amounts of energy. This is, in fact the reverse of how the world was created* ( hydrogen is fused to form the second element helium and so on. ) This process is what largely provides the energy bursting forth from the sun, and what provides heat and light to the solar system at large.
Insightful experience
One part like a great storm all consuming, I was inextricably part of and yet had been there since time began. I look at a blue painting and see not the painting but faces of past moments long gone, faces of couples in domestic situations, as if you had lived that once before, and then look more closely and you would swear it was you in the 1470s. The terror, the storm of life, impending cessation, terminating, events. You always knew this. Then, bend forward, put pressure on my navel, I go deep inside, a calming serenity, deeper, deeper and then silence, like the beginning of the universe. Lifting my eyes, my body unsettled, impending doom, as if the realization you are having, blowing away the cobwebs of illusion, will mean that the world is about to end. But it doesnt, instead you look at a picture of the faculae of the solar surface and see copulating human beings. I sit back and try to relax but the pressure is on, I reflect on my state of morality, and find I am blameless, no sin exists for me, and that all religions, although based on fact, the truth about how we exist, falls short of this overwhelming experience, if the universe is a pool of water, for most it has become obscured, you cannot see through the muddy water. I am relieved, to know the truth, strangely something that I have always known, yet buried through the fog of the mind. If the truth is revealed, it cannot stay revealed, until again it is revealed.
Wilhelmus C Ruifrok
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