Arens Jan hein | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Arens Jan hein

Netherlands (the)
Painter

21 followers !

Think outside the box? There is no box.

Jan- Hein grew up in a small town in the Netherlands. From childhood he dreamed of becoming a comic artist. At school, he spent his time drawing and was uninterested in his classes. He joined the School of Graphic Arts in Eindhoven where he discovered design, photography, composition, drawing and the history of art. He evolved in an artistic environment in which he flourished. After graduation, he worked for some time as a freelance graphic designer. Gradually, Jan-Hein felt he could not fully express his creativity through his work. So he began to paint and exhibit. With the growing success of his exhibitions he began to work less and less as a graphic designer in order to devote himself to art. For Jan-Hein, the world is composed of two types of images: real ones and those imagined by man. While artificial representations of all kinds invade everyday life, he tries to achieve the opposite. Alternating a humorous and a sombre tone, he paints ordinary objects in a different or absurd context. JanHein encourages the viewer to reflect on the deeper meaning of these images.

Jan-Hein draws his inspiration from everyday materials (magazines, newspapers, advertisements). He extracts an image that becomes the inspiration for a work. Sometimes he just flips through a dictionary in search of a meaningful word. Until 2006 Jan-Hein painted in the style of the CoBrA movement (art movement of the twentieth century responding to the conflict between abstraction and figuration). Then he began to incorporate realistic representations of human body parts. This new approach radically changed the construction of his works. Today Jan-Hein’s painting combines common elements painted realistically with flights of abstract painting. Some drawn black lines highlight the work, creating a harmony between Pop Art and CoBrA.