It’s dirty work. Dirty and tiring. Very different from drawing comics. Mark Retera (61) points to a recent canvas in his studio, a former classroom in Nijmegen. We see coarse contours of a stream with trees on the bank. But that white corner at the bottom right, it has to be different. Or not? He doubts, as always. “If I paint, I feel a kind of continuous tension in my head. Because you can go in a thousand sides. I have to try to work on my feelings, not to think too much. If I do that, then I will run the whole work within five minutes. Another week worked for nothing, that is very frustrating.”
It still feels awkward. Retera has been busy drawing his comic every day for thirty years Dirkjanhe has also made paintings since the coronation time. Previously he sometimes made watercolors on vacation, now it is serious. Abstract and semi-abstract work have his preference, in his studio there are large canvases with contrasting color areas.
Painting is something very different from drawing comics, says Retera. “It’s not just about developing your eye, but also about learning the craft. What does that paint do? What can you do with it?” A comic from Dirkjan – usually three pictures – is successful if there is a joke in it and if the composition is good. With a painting you don’t know when it is ‘good’. If you feel it is finished? Do you even like the work? Something like that, Retera thinks aloud while he pouring tea for his visit. “I feel that I am still at the very beginning of this craft.”
When I paint, I feel a kind of continuous tension in my head
In the fall of 2024 he had his first exhibition in an exhibition space in Beek – he was asked for it. His work was already with the Kunstuitleen and was previously exhibited in the town hall of his hometown of Nijmegen. So at the very beginning he is not now.
Drawing is in the family. Father Retera went to the Art Academy after his retirement as a gym teacher, his uncle was a deserving amateur barsman. Mark Retera started drawing when he moved from Eindhoven to Nijmegen to study psychology. There he published his first comics in the magazine of the Faculty and in Studentblad Ans. Later he sent his drawings about the lanky student Dirkjan and his shabby roommate Bert to Stripblad Sjors and Sjimmiethe editors were interested. His work also came to the attention of it Algemeen Dagblad And in the end he got a permanent place there, six days a week.
Mark Retera in his studio.
Photo Dieuwertje Bravenboer
Perhaps there is an agreement with cartoon drawing, Retera suggests. He sometimes draws a Dirkjan picture twenty times. He sometimes paints his paintings over; Sometimes there are more than six versions and the paint layer is eventually a sandwich thick. Retera calls herself “an ambitious man. This is not a hobby, no. A hobby went flying with a model plane on a field. Or collect stamps. I need the urge to apply; I need an audience, and confirmation. It does something to me that works have already been sold and that I would be losing the wall quickly through the art lending with people.”
Dirkjan is in the AD and in the affiliated regional newspapers. You have the longest running comic in the Netherlands at thirty years. Will your name help to sell your art?
“I am currently working on new paintings so that I will soon have about ten. I am not very busy with the promotional part, but that is coming. Nothing goes without saying, when I started with Dirkjan, I also had to go out.
“Most people who come to the Kunstuitleen will not know my name. Of course I have wondered how to present myself. In the town hall I mentioned at the Expo that I am the draftsman of Dirkjan. But because I have really taken a new path, my name hardly matters.”
Why do you paint?
“I still make strips with great pleasure and are certainly not going to stop. But my only challenge is actually still holding the level that I already have. I started to miss the horizon that I had in the beginning with cartoon drawing. Being higher and higher. Being the strip artist was the highest feasible. After so many years of painting, the frame does not cost so much more. I need that.
At the same time, he has the feeling that he has to get along. “In my father’s family, dementia occurs. I remember that he used to be quite upset if he forgot something. Because he was afraid that the disease had started. Like all his eight brothers and sisters, he indeed got dementia. In the early seventies he was 61 now. Then I still have ten years to go.”
He hopes that the fear of dementia will not control his life, but parking that fear is difficult. All he can do is work. With or without inspiration, that doesn’t matter. Inspiration is not something you deserve or that you can wait for, you call it up by sitting in front of it. Compare it to writing a Sinterklaas poem, he says. Sit and write. This is how Dirkjan has been doing for thirty years. Only occasionally does it happen that he just gets an inspiration at night. He laughs. “Those jokes always turn out to be very bad the next morning.”
Retera must ‘turn’ herself before he goes to work. Wrind a feather. Sometimes it is easier than the other. “It takes time. I also notice it physically, I have to go to the toilet all the time.”
He thinks the ideas for the Dirkjan strips partly with colleague Wilfred Ottenheijm, with whom he has been working for years. Always at the same table in the De Lindenberg cultural center, always on Monday morning. The comics are worked out and supplemented for the rest of the week.
He does not yet have such a routine for painting. In the beginning he took pictures of the landscape in the Ooijpolder near Nijmegen, and then edit them on the computer. With those images he then started working on the canvas. Now he usually starts with a lick of paint on a white surface. For inspiration, he also likes to watch documentaries in which painters talk about their technology and their shortcomings. “I find expressionists from the fifties and sixties inspiring. People like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. But they were in the drink and died early. I just didn’t have to do that.”
Painting gives a sense of freedom. A lot is not possible in the Dirkjan strips, or no longer. Because Retera does take the sensitivities in society into account, he says. For example, one of his famous characters was Mr. Ping, a Vietnamese spring roll seller. He could not pronounce the R and that resulted in melegous conversations.
I am someone looking up the edges. That is also necessary, because it must remain funny for the readers. “
“I was tapped on my fingers by fellow strip drawer Maaike Hartjes. I was very high. She made it clear to me why Mr. Ping’s accent was no longer possible. That I am a white CIS man and therefore never bumped into discrimination. But that there are other people in the Netherlands for whom they no longer do not find it. They are no longer fun at this time. ”
Colleague Wilfred Ottenheijm he calls it “conscience” of his comics. He often says “let’s not do that”, if Retera has once again a joke that is too filthy or too flat. “I am someone who looks up the edges. That must, because it must remain funny for the readers.”
He draws his comics at home, he makes the paintings here in the rented classroom full of donkeys and paint tubes. Very occasionally he achieves a moment of euphoria, if a canvas ‘beats’.
You are a mountaineer. Is the euphoria of achieving a top similar?
“I always walked a lot in the mountains, but I wanted more challenge. Then I started climbing with a mountain guide, in the Italian Alps. It is an adrenalinerush. During the climb I was terrified, it took a lot of energy. Then you are finally down again and the relief is that you are still amazing. It is a kind of dear for weeks. If I have it with the people, then you can compare that feeling, yes. “
However, climbing was no longer easy to justify with the home front, and that is why Retera recently stopped. “I have a woman and two children. Then you hang a rope against such a ice plate and you know: that guide doesn’t keep me if I fall now. It can go very easily.”
Then drawing and painting are a lot safer. He can enjoy the sun that invades his office while he is working. That he sees the ink dry. Or that someone likes a new painting. “That stimulates. Maybe I can even generate income from this in a few years, I hope that of course. I can still be insecure, I do have faith in myself. Many people say that I should not make any illusions, that there is no dry bread to be earned. But they said that about cartoon drawing.”