Hans Steffelaar, painter.
Book, 90 pages, 29 x 42 cm.
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Interview and text editing: Lucy Engelen.
Photography: Barry Slot, Eddy van ’t Westende
Webdesign: Station Noord, Eric van der Wal.
Poignant and highly topical
Ambition, human endeavour, but also neglect, death, decay and the beauty therein: this is what the Dutch painter Hans Steffelaar is dealing with in his paintings. Especially his recent work reflects serious worry about the state of affairs in the world, his abstract and figurative paintings alike.
There is nothing but decline, and the painter’s anger. The personal commentary of any artist on the world in which he finds himself is as old as art itself. According to Steffelaar: “I do not want to moralize, but evidently there is no avoiding the personal angle. One must have a certain extent of relevance if painting is one’s life.”
Loss and decline in a heedless world. A tragedy, represented with no drama at all.
Public acclaim
Considerable public acclaim for Hans Steffelaar’s ‘We Won’
‘I came to see Turner, but fell for Steffelaar’
‘GREAT work!’
‘I was dumbfounded: how compelling these canvases are!’
‘Dark subjects, but with a touching beauty’
Biography
Hans Steffelaar was born in 1940 in a family where an academic education for the children was self-evident. He studied medicine and became a surgeon. He worked in Almelo from 1976 to 2005, the last 17 years only for 60% to enable him to spend more time painting.
From his earliest childhood on painting was an elementary component in Hans Steffelaar’s life. He received his formal Art Education the AKI-Artez Academy of Arts.