Luuk Wilmering
The Civic Guard portrait groups
2015
6 collages
mounted on
museum board
(one work)
each
50 x 65 cm
Around 2006, I began studying Frans Hals' Civic Guard portrait groups. I had been familiar with these paintings for a long time, but in 2006, an imaginary conversation arose between Hals and me. I was working on a series of group portraits myself at the time and asked him for advice. Among other things, we discussed perspective.
We talked about painterly perspective versus photographic perspective, where a figure sometimes stands close to the lens and is therefore large in the image, while other figures are small in the background. I managed to convince him that photographic perspective is more vivid and closer to reality
For the work The Civic Guard Portrait Groups, which consists of six collages, I sought out Frans Hals again in 2015. We talked about perspective once more. I also told him how artists nowadays sometimes collaborate in order to share experiences and enjoyment and to sharpen their own thoughts with those of others, unlike with students.
Art is a great living debate with constantly shifting positions, and our “works of art” are the arguments and points of discussion in that debate. And really nothing more than proposals of what art could be.
He responded to these developments with great interest and enthusiasm. I then made a few suggestions to him regarding adjustments to the perspective and compositions of his paintings and collaborations with artists such as Maarten van Heemskerck, Lucas van Leyden, Judith Leyster and/or Jacob van Ruisdael.