AN CRAPS

An Craps lives and works near Brussels and graduated from the BKO Academy of Visual and Audiovisual Arts in Overijse in June 2017. Today, she is training here to specialize in painting.

She starts from existing or her own composed images and personal photographs, which are powerful and confrontational, but also have a certain melancholy and imperfection. As a result, they unconsciously or consciously evoke questions and emotions. She has been collecting these for years in both a paper and digital archive.

 

An element that is always palpable in her portfolio is a constant search for personal development and individuality (amassed through new impressions, knowledge and daily experiences) versus the need for breathing room, focus and simplicity.

Although the start of a new series is partly coincidental and the theme is not an end in itself, its choice is always accompanied by that tension between excess and tranquility. Also decisive is the beauty she sees in the imperfection of the subject. The choice of color palette is a means of building the mood she wants to convey. The powerful sketches of Rubens, the Seville series by Meunier but also the Spanish artist Sorolla have an influence on the applied movement in the works and also in the color palette used. In addition, An is also heavily influenced by the abstract paintings of the 1960s by Cy Twombly or Joan Mitchell, so the work is mostly large-scale expressionist, focused on the emotional interaction between viewer and painting. The works also contain some structure or a limited amount of realism but this is mostly accidental and not an end in itself.

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The process she employs allows her to escape from the everyday rat race that is society and creates an oasis of mental calm where the impressions acquired from her personal quest are employed. The basic image is at some point let go and so the work becomes a non-existent new world in which both the maker and the viewer can go on a quest.

 She uses as a base a powerful and recognizable script to apply the different materials such as acrylic, oil paint, pastel or ink and combines this with subtle details that arise from coincidences or are applied very consciously. She builds up the work in many layers and plays with the paint by combining transparencies and opaque layers. Because of all these choices made, the work needs breathing room to penetrate.

 

The end point is a non-existent new world in which both the creator and the viewer can become detached from the environment and explore.