Publications

When Fleur Damman-van Gelder was recovering from a near-fatal head injury, she took comfort in the work of Marc Mulders. His colour palette can be seen in the Baoli range

What do you do when, as a painter, you want to get away from all the noise and issues of the day? All those raised voices, opinions and condemnations made by politicians and extreme believers. But also: away from your own sense of being right. It so happens that the painter can behave like a gardener, planting and tending meadows of flowers and then letting these resound as echoes on the painter's canvas. Painting after nature is a quiet process and does not involve loud recitation, but rather the whispering of a vocabulary in a range of hues, gradations and moods derived from nature.

In the painter’s manual that he compiled during the second half of his life, Albrecht Dürer expresses the insights passed down to him from the ancient Greeks. Answers to the artist’s questions should be sought in nature, he says, since only nature can provide the ideal model. Indeed, divine reality is revealed in it. This is not only to be found in the human form of a suffering Christ, but also in the hare and the deer, in splinters and grass.[1]

When Marc Mulders moved, in 2008, from the center of Tilburg to the rural estate Baest,[1] twenty kilometers away, and set up his studio in a large barn, he assumed that some change would occur in his work. The day-to-day surroundings had, after all, changed radically. All at once Mulders had 'the outdoor studio', as he calls it. The garden, the woods, the meadows and birds, the fog and flowers were right at his door, alive and in constant flux, driven by the seasons. For an artist like Mulders, it would be strange if such a change would not affect his work. Yet several years passed before the work revealed any visible transformations. And that says something, in fact, about what takes place when painting is conceived on the basis of nature and about the specific course that Mulders steers in this respect.