Arlaque de Clerque

She has been drawing since she was a child—even on the wallpaper, much to her mother’s dismay. Although Arlaque considers herself largely self-taught, she also has a formal academic background. For three years, she attended the Free Academy in The Hague every day. Her urge to work on a large scale caused some spatial problems there. She was eventually banished from the painters’ quarters and assigned a spot among the sculptors. There was still room there for the young artist who possessed a grand urge to express herself. An added stroke of luck was that the sculpture studio was located next to the office of the art academy’s then-director, Bob Bonus. He personally took Arlaque under his wing and taught her the ropes. This resulted, among other things, in Arlaque’s exuberant use of color and her preference for abstract painting. Soon after, she painted a work 17 meters wide and 5 meters high for Rotterdam’s Ahoy. And then, for the Floriade, a “modest” canvas measuring 11 by 3 meters.

Over the past six months, Arlaque’s color palette has begun to shift. The brightly colored works featuring lots of green, red, and blue are giving way to calmer white backgrounds with brown-black veined motifs. The work takes on a different meaning. “When my brother became terminally ill last year, I had to do something about it. I had to express my grief somehow. My first instinct is to do that through painting, so I intuitively reached for the colors black, brown, and white. The backgrounds had to be calmer. It makes sense in hindsight, but at the time it was a purely instinctive process. Yes, I think I’m starting to settle down a bit.” Still, this sounds a bit ironic coming from the now 60-year-old artist who recently did a photo shoot at Escape in Amsterdam featuring the Dutch Miss Pole Dancing pageant, still regularly goes out with her 18-year-old grandson, and doesn’t have a single gray hair. "I take life in stride and know how to distinguish what’s important from what isn’t. I think this direct approach to life is clearly reflected in

my work."