Ronald Zuurmond (1964)
Ronald Zuurmond has built up a vast oeuvre of landscapes and still lifes. He often applies his paint in liberal strokes, only to then work it down to a rich even topcoat. Zuurmond scrapes layers of paint away and then applies new ones with a pallet knife or brush, or saturates his canvases with turpentine. Other materials he has used include sand, lint, paint scrapings and thin cloth threads. Every application shimmers in the ultimate composition in the artist's mind. His canvases have a very spatial effect: colours and light beam from a tangible symphony of paint.
His paintings are often based on moods and everyday things. In his paintings, a banana peel, a fly curtain or the pudgy buds of a flowering sprig can be more than they are. In 2008, Zuurmond first began including figures in his paintings, with explicit allusion to painters such as Van Dyck, but with an imposing presence of both life and death in the atmosphere of his dark canvases.
