It is not surprising that there is great interest in the paintings of the Frisian artist Gert-Jan Veenstra (Workum, 1957) both at home and abroad. His work fits into the realistic tradition of the old Dutch masters, who made Dutch painting world famous. But there is more. Veenstra's most important subject is the Dutch landscape. A theme that has inspired more than just visual artists throughout the centuries. 'What remains is landscape' wrote the poet Ad Zuiderent, and his colleague Rutger Kopland said about it: 'The landscape gives the illusion that time stands still, but that is an illusion. It is such an endlessly slow event that we cannot experience it. We are only short-lived passers-by. As far as I am concerned, poets should make time visible, and indeed time becomes most visible in an attempt to make it stand still.' In his paintings, Gert-Jan Veenstra makes time stand still. He shows us landscapes and cityscapes that were there before we came, and that will hopefully be there for a long time after us. Yet Veenstra's paintings, made with astonishing craftsmanship, are certainly not 'painted photographs'. They often show scenes that we could see with our own eyes, but what we saw would never correspond to a painting by Veenstra. The artist interprets reality. A realistic interpretation, certainly, but not a copy of it. The atmosphere that he manages to create in an inimitable way is unmistakably his atmosphere. His work, however realistic, is recognizable and irreplaceably his.
Kees Spiering.