On the Interpretation of My Drawings and Watercolours

Leonurdo,Vol. 5, pp. 51-53. PergamonPress 1972. Printed in Great Britain ON THE INTERPRETATION OF MY DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLOURS Ivan Ingen* In a brief text I wrote for the monthly magazine, Br&-Plan&e, in October 1968 [l], I concluded as follows: 'Taking everything into consideration, my watercolours have obvious surrealistic tendencies. One should be careful to read into them certain metaphysicalmessagesand psychologicalintentions, which is often done, and in which case a critic is on the mark'. I wrote this as a reaction to off-the-mark remarks one hears at exhibitions and to reviews written by art critics. It is clear that metaphysical messagesand psychological characteristics of an artist even may sneak in unconsciously into his works. I shall now consider this in the light of my experienceof having a break of 25 years between periods of making drawings and watercolours. *Artistlivingat Kampstraat 2, Baarn, Holland. (Received 2 February 1971.) When I was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts atThe Hague, I found that there was little room for an artist to freely express himself. And yet, between 1936 and 1939, after having acquired technical skill and some knowledge of the history of architecture, I developed a personal styleof my own. I made a series of rather large pencil drawings, one of which is shown in Figure 1. I have kept reviews of my works of this period. The principal ideas stressed in these reviews can be summarized as follows: Ingen's work contains the satyrical of George Grosz and Otto Dix, the vision of Hieronymus Bosch, the mysticism of Jules de Bruycker, a reincarnation of Pieter Bruegel-all this with a skill, mastery of form and patience typical of another era. It is evident that the critics were trying to label and rank my work. Unfortunately, itproved impossibleformeto earn a living as an artist and, hence, in 1945,I decided to Fig. 1. 'Fragmentof an Old City',pencil drawing on ivory cardboard,50 x 65 cm, 1936-1939. 51 52 Ican Ingen Fig. 2. ‘Belly Organ’, watercolour, 32 x 20 cm, 1968. accept a post as an art teacher in a secondary school. As a teacher, I managed to continue my own work by making illustrations for books and by writing didactic books on drawing [2,31. In 1960 (25 years later) I resumed the making of drawings and watercoloirrs for I could not resist the urge. But I found that notions about art had changed so much that I had to change my own attitudes. This led me to try new media and techniques, especially, I tried making collages of coloured fragments taken from magazines. Finally, I returned to watercolour because the printed magazine fragments faded rather rapidly. In a period of rapid change in life, people, especially artists, react, for example, in constructive, satyrical, mystical, symbolic, erotic or humorous ways. Today there are excesses on all sides, whether in the scale of works or in the manipulation of the parts of the human figure. Bosch, in his day, busied himself with religion; de Bruycker was obsessed with aspects of war ; and Grosz and Dix tackled social conditions brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Their works appear to me to be more interesting and of greater aesthetic value than those of my contemporaries. What the critics said about my work 25 years ago is, perhaps, more relevant to my present work, which I believe is more mature, more acutely felt and more representative of my ideas. I have chosen for this note two examples of it. The ‘Belly Organ’, shown in Figure 2, owes the origin of its ideas to a remembered image on one of the panels ofthe bronze doors of the San Zeno church in Verona, Italy. The freely-interpreted remembered image represents one of my conceptions of the world. The second, entitled ‘Is Behind in Front or Bottom Up ?’ (cf. Fig. 3), I leave to the viewer to interpret, however, to me it represents a manipulation of such notions as reality-illusion and reality-dreams. Fig, 3. ‘IsBehind in Front or Bottom Up?’, wntercolour, 50.5 x 32 cm, 1971. Notes: On the Interpretation of My Drawings and Watercolours REFERENCES 1. I. Ingen...