Luuk Wilmering

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The Civic Guard portrait groups

2015

6 collages

mounted on

museum board

(one work)

each

50 x 65 cm

Frans Hals is a friend. I have known him for a long time, but especially in recent years we have become good friends. That started around 2006 when I started a series of group portraits and asked him for advice. We then started talking about perspective, among other things. About painterly perspective versus photographic perspective, where a figure is sometimes close to the lens and therefore large in the frame and others small in the background. I was able to convince him that the photographic perspective is more lively and closer to reality.

For the work The Civic Guard Portrait Groups (2015), which consists of 6 collages, I again sought a conversation with Frans Hals. This time in response to his Civic Guard Portrait Group paintings. We've been talking about perspective again. And I told him how artists nowadays sometimes enter into collaborations to share experiences and pleasure and to sharpen their thoughts.

Art is a great living debate with constantly changing views and positions and our 'art works' are the arguments and discussion points... and nothing more than proposals of what art could be. He responded to these developments with great interest and enthusiasm. And I subsequently made him some proposals for adjustments in perspective and composition of his paintings and for collaborations with artists such as Maarten van Heemskerck, Lucas van Leyden, Judith Leyster or Jacob van Ruisdael.