Linda van den Boogert

Once there was this handsome woman with four children and a husband. She lived on the edge of a vast piece of land, where the horizon connects heaven and earth. She looked and listened and she listened for days. Then, at last colours and shapes appeared on paper, like signs in our time, revealing something over matters normally intangible like truth, bonds, birth, searches, respect for love and compassion, death and resurrection. She discovered that these drawings reinforced the feet of them who tripped, gave rest and piece to the weary, and that they helped them who wanted to stand up. She startled and asked herself: is there an inter-being? Are we really children of the Father?

Linda van den Boogert works and lives in Fijnaart. She draws with pencil and water paints. She is self-taught. Who carefully examines these drawings, that appear when Linda, in front of white canvases, surrenders to more mysterious possibilities, at first sight will see plants that are not plants, an under water duckweed, that is not duckweed, a kind of landscape, that is not a landscape, a kind of person that is not made of flesh and blood. No matter how hard we try, each word used to describe a drawing draws short. Because when we try, we wind up in a different description, that, ultimately also fails to describe the whole. It seems though, as if the indescribable, which also exists in colour and shape, becomes visible and tangible. What becomes cannot be changed nor erased, works or does not work. Deeply anchored, something pre-verbal exists which communicates, because many people react positively or negatively to her drawings, is Linda’s experience. She observed that those who looked at her drawings, also looked into themselves. After all, looking is reflection at the same time. Meanwhile Linda is drawing more and more and colour is always essential. She finds pleasure in doing this and a handwriting is recognisable. The drawings mostly come up in moments of quietness, sometimes lasting for days. They are not a goal in themselves, more are they a way with which Linda can address people.

Are these paintings based on how she sees the world herself, or how she sees herself and or the people around her? Who is to know. It remains a fact that these drawings, just as the stars in heaven, remind of light and colour, of order and disorder, of harmony and battle, and can give a meaning to chaos. They are just like air, untouchable. But air becomes wind, and wind makes ships sail. Linda knows how to capture this. Her works are like psychological footsteps in which one can step to feel the force that made them exist. They come into being in a mystic and secret way. As soon as they disconnect from her, they take on a life of their own. They become some sort of personality, a kind of being, that can put people into colours and can show a glimpse of eternity. Linda’s drawings remind me of a pronouncement from Rainer Maria Rilke: 'things are not so easy to understand and to explain as people would have us believe. Most happenings can not be expressed with words: they occur in the space never stepped into by one word. Yet even more difficult to express in words are the works of art – the mysterious forms of existence of which life endures while ours expires.'

Nicole Hermans Den Haag, February 14th 2007