Petra Hartman: 'My work is purely determined by chance'

- Petra Hartman 1960 -

Over the past twenty years, Hartman has made her name with flamboyant jewellery and bag designs. “To me the bag is the body and jewellery the soul. They belong together. But my paintings form the basis.

In the eighties, Hartman studied art at the Arnhem art academy. She concentrated on painting and drawing and that’s where she met her partner, designer Ruud-Jan Kokke. “He left school and started a carpentry company. We travelled together throughout the Netherlands to sell his first lattice chair.” The teachers at the academy looked upon the carpenter’s adventure with sorrow. “After four and a half years, I was sent away. They believed that I should map out my own route. I started painting whatever appeared in front of the window of our house boat and I’ve never stopped. Since then, I have painted flowers, landscapes and nudes. The bags came later.”

Hartman used the form of a bouquet of flowers for her first bag. “I got engrossed in the phenomenon: what does a bag feel like, what does it look like, what is in it? As long as you can put something in it and it has a handle, as far as I’m concerned it’s a bag. Whether you take it with you to the market, that’s another matter. I make somewhat flamboyant versions, with lots of Dutch gilt and diamonds. I cut and use pictures from old photographs, romantic dinners with naked women and sea landscapes.” The energy put into her work is also reflected in the Harman paintings, so that her canvases remain affordable and accessible. “I sometimes sit tinkering away and sewing on my bags and jewellery for a long time. Although they, like the paintings, have a kind of coarseness and carelessness that makes them interesting, painting goes quite a bit faster.' Hartman points to a vase of flowers on the table. “I used to paint them immediately in order to be sure of the right light and shades.

Now I use a tiny camera, my digital sketch book. I try out the paint quickly, with concentration and apply it immediately. It’s allowed to be a little wild. That requires a fast, concentrated working method. It is a question of brooding around about it for a long time and then: off you go! But you can’t make a hundred in a day that way.” Colour appeared to be essential to Hartman’s work, but lately she’s abandoned that too. “This landscape was painted here in Ooosterbeek, with the oldest Dutch church in the background.” Hartman brings out two large black and white panels that are in keeping with each other. “I have also made it in blue with red, with bold powerful lines. Because the lines are so graphic, I don’t then think in nuances but in coarse strong contrasts, a little bit silk-screen-like.”

In the display room where she keeps her canvases, the eye falls on another black and white work in 3D. “I experiment with paper sculptures. I need to find a more appropriate name for them. The back is flat as they are objects for hanging on the wall. First I make the form and then I search for a suitable painting.” Does Hartman’s new work herald a new black and white period? “In a certain sense it does break with my tradition of colour. In a certain sense, because it is black and white, but it looks colourful. It is colour in black and white.” “What a mess, isn’t it?” Hartman’s studio shows the importance of variety in her work: bags (user objects and museum pieces), jewellery, giant jewellery, colourful expressive paintings, and graphic canvases in black and white. Is there a theme to the work? “I believe so. It isn’t all so very precise. There is something imperfect about it. It seems I need to do lots of different things.

I like the fact that such a variety of people value my work: museum directors and my neighbour too, scholarly connoisseurs of art as well as children looking on spontaneously.”

http://www.petrahartman.com/

Petra Hartman’s work is also for sale in the Leolux-Design-Center and visitors center Via Creandi.