Determined Eye
“Mountains of color,” I said when I visited Yasmine Willems’ studio. Mountains of color, mountains
of creamy blue paint, frozen in peaks on her worktable. In a cabinet stood jars of pigments, ready
for when the artist would want to work with egg tempera again, just as our miniature painters did in
the fifteenth century.
Today, Yasmine Willems works with oil paint. She paints layer upon layer, patiently waiting as each
layer dries. This drying time turns painting into a thoughtful, prolonged process, in which the work
itself indicates which decisions are effective and which are not. “I like to surprise myself.” Layer
upon layer creates unusually deep colors. The result in this recent series of paintings is, at first
glance, a fiery, shimmering blue.
The paintings are connected to the remote polders where the artist lives, but they are not
traditional landscapes, nor are they impressions or snapshots. The polders surround, protect, and
provide calm and concentration; day in, day out, the wind and clouds change, mist obscures, rain
showers pass over, rising or descending darkness compresses the light in the evening, dew
appears. None of this can be controlled by humans, but the human mind naturally sees patterns in
what seems to happen randomly: pareidolia. Looking at the man in the moon with the bundle on
his back, or at NASA photos of the Horsehead Nebula or the Pillars of Creation, these are familiar
forms of seeing pareidolia.
Identifying pareidolia was for a long time a technical exercise for artists: Leonardo da Vinci advised
his colleagues to look at moisture stains on walls, mud, rocks, and clouds, and recognize things in
them – this sharpened their visual abilities. “Unclear things stimulate the mind to new inventions.”
Later, in the sixteenth century, artists in Augsburg worked on a Book of Wonders, with stunning
illustrations of miraculous signs in the heavens, described in the Bible, observed or predicted:
comets, sundogs, fires, dragons, warriors in the clouds, battling angels.
What lies in the space between what we know and what we see? That question arose for the artist
as she observed the clouds and wind over the polders and dikes. The cloud is a symbol of the
elusive divine in the Old Testament, and ‘wind’ there also means breath and spirit. In this series of
paintings, the clouds are uncontrollable, free, and transcendent. They behold the world beneath
them with a determined, sometimes touching eye. Rain drips into a sea of tears. Stacked
rectangles at the lower edge represent a human attempt at grasp and understanding, a futile
practice of control: the building of a temple? A green path disappears into a point on the horizon,
black celestial bodies complete their orbit, dew rises in milky crystalline columns. Between clouds
and earth, a vertical band forms. The wonder of Jacob's Ladder can also be found in everyday
environments.
While fiery blue is the first color that strikes the viewer, the bold use of black and white is also
noticeable in these paintings. Yasmine Willems likes to let her scenes rise from a black
background. It’s a somewhat unconventional working method, a free approach to color and color
theory, nourished by personal preference, the Book of Wonders, and admired masters like James
Ensor and Jean Brusselmans.
What lies in the space between what we already know and what we see? For centuries, artists
have visualized scientific findings in drawings (such as of the skeleton, the circulatory system), in
diagrams, maps, and astronomical illustrations. They have also, as Jan Van Eyck did, paved the
way for insight and science by exploring our visual experience (such as of light reflection). The
patterns and pareidolia that Yasmine Willems shows us make us suspect how vast the space
between knowing and understanding might still be. With her pareidolia, she opens up possibilities,
paving a path for us toward a viewpoint that offers more than half-understood science and vague
feelings. She gives us a fresh look at a territory we have barely begun to explore.
© Leen Huet