Description
‘Coming Home’
Stained glass panel
31.5 x 31.3 cm. Ready to hang.
Collect from gallery £625
Including UK delivery £665
Frans Wesselman was born in Holland where he trained to be an art teacher before his conscription into the Dutch army. After two years in the army he gained a diploma in printmaking and photography at Groningen College of Art.
His work has been much influenced by both Picasso and Rembrandt and he has seriously tried to paint like both, finding no contradiction in this. “I am a qualified teacher of art history so it is all in me and gets used.” His work is of people doing things, feeling things, worrying about things. His work is thought provoking – as Frans puts it – “I need to have my mind engaged”. He is trying always to get inside his subjects, to convey an impression of the human psyche. “It is the most difficult job I have ever done”, says Frans, “but also the most rewarding”.
“I am a painter above all. I love to look at paintings and drawings; I get a lot out of it. You can look at the detail of a picture and marvel at what the artist has achieved by a single brush stroke. That is it, the satisfaction, when you find the right stroke and it just lights up the whole picture”. He says a painting is successful if it has a living character, an independent life of its own.
Frans works in watercolour and stained glass and also produces limited edition fine art prints in his own mix of wood cut and etching – a medium which can give an amazingly 3D impression. Surprisingly for such a modern painter he finds many of his ideas in Shakespeare, Chaucer and the Bible.
Frans moved to England in 1979 where he has worked and exhibited widely in both one-man shows and group exhibitions. His paintings and etchings are in private collections as well as in the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam museums. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Printmakers. Often his paintings, etchings and stained glass tell a story.
