At the age of 9, Erna Anema (Leeuwarden, 1954) gave a speech about the climb of Mount Everest. ‘I’ll go there when I grow up,’ she thought. And she kept her word. She translates her experiences in the mountains into paintings, which can now be seen at Kunstmaand Ameland.
The app connection with Kathmandu is fine. Erna Anema sounds loud and clear in Leeuwarden on this Thursday morning. “I’m sitting here in a room where other people are eating, so I don’t talk too loud.” It’s lunchtime on her side of the world.
It is certainly not the first time she has stayed in Nepal. As a child she gave a speech about climbing Mount Everest and decided then that she wanted to go there when she grew up. She made her first trip after leaving the Rietveld Academy. “We wanted to go overland, but the war between Iran and Iraq had just broken out, so we flew.” Her fascination was purely with the mountains, she says. “I use its abstract appearance in my paintings.”
Several of her paintings hang in the church in Ballum, during Art Month Ameland. They are characterized by the grand gesture. The shapes she paints arise from the physical movement she makes with the brush, she says. “The images that arise represent my fascinations acquired during my travels to distant regions.”
Link with Nepal
Traveling to Nepal, where the craftsmen also ensured that she would return often. “On one side of the street were the goldsmiths, on the other side the potters… It was a true El Dorado of craftsmanship.”
In the 1990s she sometimes traveled to the roof of the world twice a year. “Until the craftsman I worked with there moved to Saudi Arabia. Then I briefly tried to build the bond I had with Rajesh with other craftsmen, but that was very difficult. As familiar as he had become, with all the (for him) strange objects that required a lot of craftsmanship…’
In the meantime, she had become a teacher at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and had also acquired a position in Kathmandu’s art scene. She wondered what Dutch applied arts students would do if they came into contact with Asian craftsmen who worked here on a square meter, and she came up with the NedNep 1 exchange.
In order to communicate (“The craftsmen don’t speak English”) she needed students from the art academy who could. Moreover, there was a lot to gain: “At the Rietveld Academy you work with concepts, in Nepal they copied – very beautifully – our Van Gogh. There was fallow land there.”
Twenty Dutch students each wrote an invitation letter to a Nepalese student: with an image of a proposal. “Nepali craftsmen belong to the lowest caste. At that time (2008), Nepalese students did not know the craft around the corner. Dutch students are used to working in a workshop and with a workshop assistant.”
The group stayed in Nepal for five weeks. “Afterwards, five selected Nepalese students came to the Netherlands, where they received help from a student in carrying out their plans.” The project was very successful, she says. “Three or four of them are currently operating on the international stage. I am very proud of that.”
Earthquake
A few days ago it was hit in the northwest, but Nepal was also hit by an earthquake in 2015. It inspired Anema to work and to a second NedNep: 53 seconds five years later . “The first time I was more of an initiator and producer than a teacher, with about fifty people I managed. This time the group was smaller, they had to fit on one bus. And I had an assistant who arranged practical matters. Because sometimes you need generators for power, when making videos or casting statues.” The project now came from the side of the Nepalese, and their hearts were full of it. Those 53 seconds that shook their world to its foundations.
“I am now working on NedNep 3, this time for artists. The working title is: Burning rice fields to urban growth .” The Kathmandu Valley has swallowed up all its surrounding towns and villages. The bright green rice fields have disappeared. “The clay from the rice fields has literally been burned up by the brick factories into a city. That is what concerns Nepalese artists.” Due to urbanization, farmers are losing their land and work.
Anema will work with clay from the valley. “I have also made spatial work before, but this is an excursion. I am primarily a painter.” And what she makes comes close to painting, she says, because here too she tries to make the grand gesture. “But that makes it vulnerable.” She will return on December 1. “The clay has to dry!” Her stay is a prelude to the Kathmandu triennial, of which NedNep 3 will be part, with exhibitions in the Vishal in Haarlem and in Nepal.
Art month Ameland
That is why she is not on Ameland for the Art Month, but her work is. With broad brushes she paints large abstract shapes in highly diluted oil paint. During Art Noord, gallery owner Feike Hoekstra showed in his moving gallery Alta Bosca a number of works from the series Glaciers , inspired, among other things, by ice masses in Nepal. “I have been interested in glaciers for years, you see that they are disappearing more and more. Large holes are created in the moraines, which I can depict very well in paint.” A few small works from this series can be seen in the church of Ballum.
The main focus in Ballum, however, is her large ones Sky shadows . “I like to work in series and am often working on several canvases at the same time.” Sky shadows is inspired by the clouds and their shadows below you, when you are high in the mountains. When she walks there and passes the fog, she sees up there “that clouds are bouncing up or being sucked down by the air pressure. How spots of sunlight splash out in the valley… I can use all my painting experience on that.”
The Wadden Sea and islands have the same value for her, with their mirages and the depth they provide. “As a child I always looked for which cloud belonged to which shadow. Those moving shadows… Always the same and always different.”
Art month
Art Month Ameland lasts the entire month of November. Spread across the island, there are exhibitions at dozens of locations, both indoors and outdoors, with work by artists active in various disciplines. From jewelry to sculptures and from paintings to installations. Opening hours: Tue to Sat 10.30am – 5pm, Sun 12pm – 5pm (or longer as in hotels or outside). The art route includes an extensive side program with lectures, workshops, music and film.
Four tips
Anema is one of almost 100 artists exhibiting during Art Month Ameland. We highlight four of them.
Karl-Johan Sellberg makes spheres from wood and resin in which he incorporates colors. In this way he creates new worlds and shows the character of wood in a surprising way. In Duinoord in Nes.
Photographer Bethany deForest builds worlds in a kind of viewing boxes, which she photographs. In her work, vegetables, flowers and objects take on a completely different role. In the De Wachting mill in Hollum.
Nataliya Vladychko has decorated the outdoor space at Grijpstra in Ballum as a kind of laboratory. There are botanical drawings everywhere, delicate germs of laboratory glass, and old notes on porcelain that resembles paper.
In the metal objects of Peter Shook its circuit boards are recessed. With their poisonous green or yellow light, they look like archaeological finds from the future. In Tower in Nes.