Extract of a letter from Hans Peeters

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From a letter from Hans Peeters.

“I have savored your paintings, Joseph, almost daily. To my eye, water is the great unifying theme, no matter which way those sometimes unbelievable colors take you. Even land-based scenes — flowers, woodlots, birds — seem water images (reflections?) tilted upright, an impression that is of course enhanced by the translucency of the medium (Summer’s End 2004 is a perfect example). Seen as water paintings, these works invite exploration of their depths and their mysteries, their allusions, suggestions, and ever-changing shapes. 
Colors diffuse or form briefly solid objects or outline biomorphic shapes — how watery is that?

The great translucent white fish in “Spirit” (2006) did not strike me as crucifix-like, at least not in the beginning; rather, I saw it as a mothership hovering while its smaller adjunct vessels explore the incredible diversity and wealth of space, either aquatic or cosmic. 
Must be my areligious, biologist’s eye. And I see the orderly movement and comportment of the fish in “Pond, Fish Reflections” (2005) 
as an example of the intrinsic symmetry of nature, as also reflected in the leaves.

Yet, boisterous life coils below the surface, erupting here and there (Life Streams, 2004). 
And blues are everywhere, painted by someone who must love to gaze into the sky, a dreamer…”

Ansel Adams

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ansel

A letter Ansel Adams, an icon of landscape photography,
sent to his friend Cedric Wright on June 10, 1937

Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today.
I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone;
the resonance of all spiritual and physical things….

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give.
It is not charity, which is the giving of things.
It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self.
It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.
It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel