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"Orchard to the Sea " © 2005
Oil on canvas, 8 "x10"
Artist's Statement
Painting, for me, is about color, shape, and space. To make a painting is to find a way to release their energy and meaning.
I like color. I like it for its own sake, and I like it for its expressive value. I'm with the Fauves and the Dutch COBRA artists.
My landscape paintings are interpretations of real places. I confess that I am pre-occupied with a small handful of places. This has led me over the years to do a series of paintings about them. Some of these places show up in my "Bridge", "Cumberland", and "Freeport" paintings. Over the past few years, in recent work, I have disassembled and re-arranged the imagery of these places.
My paintings and drawings of the human figure are about the interaction between the figures and the space that they occupy. I am struck by the way in which the human figure fills and bends space.
I work with oil paint, acrylic, and enamel. I use found objects, collage, glue, charcoal, crayon, pastel, ink and watercolor. When I start a painting I do not know in advance where it will go. When I finally resolve it, I discover what drove me to do it in the first place. I think the sources of painting, and of art generally, are unknown to us. They flow from some reservoir which is mysterious and universal.
Artist Bio
Jan ter Weele in the studio.
(photo by Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest)
Jan ter Weele, born in Groningen, The Netherlands, is a painter with a studio in Portland, Maine.
His paintings have been in solo exhibits in Portland at Gallery at The Clown and Aucocisco Gallery at The Eastland. He had a solo exhibit in the Maine Art Gallery vestibule as well as three featured exhibits at Stable Gallery in Damariscotta.
His paintings were in a four-person invitational show at Gallery 415 in Chicago. He was in three successive invitational shows at the New O'Farrell Gallery in Brunswick, Maine, along with Neil Welliver and Lois Dodd, among others. He exhibited in invitational shows at the University of Southern Maine in Lewiston-Auburn and at Gold/Smith Gallery in Boothbay Harbor.
His paintings have been accepted into many juried shows, including shows at Essex Art Center in Lawrence Mass., the University of New England, and the College of the Atlantic.
He studied at Maine College of Art, Massachusetts College of Art, Honolulu Academy of Art, and the Art Students League of New York with John Hultberg, Peter Golfinopoulos, and Cornelia Foss.
He holds a BA degree from Princeton University, and MAT and Ed.D. degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Education. He graduated cum laude from Pomfret School.
His paintings are Fauvist and post-modern. They are in many collections throughout the United States as well as in collections in Europe and Japan.
He is a former school superintendent who resigned his position in l995 to paint full-time. For many years before that he painted on weekends and during vacations.
