Leon Adriaans (1944-2004)
By day, Leon Adriaans worked his farm and tended livestock, but by night, he came to life as a painter. He worked without a predetermined plan, calling his stories into being with fleeting, airy brushstrokes. In the nineteen sixties, his media was material found on his farm. He painted human and animal figures or abstract symbols and patterns on objects like empty cattle feed sacks, weather-beaten wood, packing paper, and scrap cloth. Adriaans made his own paint from pure, natural pigments, which he referred to as 'reaping the benefits of the fruits of nature.'*
His early works are primarily depictions of geometric forms in black, white and red, accompanied by the occasional human or animal figure. But when he began painting on canvas, in the early nineteen-nineties, the variation in his figures and colours expanded dramatically. He began producing smaller and larger works, and combinations of the two as diptyches. To test the power of his works, he would look at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. If he was not happy with his work when viewed from a great distance, he would go back to work on it or simply destroy it.
* A. Berk, ‘Leon Adriaans’, Kunstbeeld, 2003, # 2, p. 45
