jasper krabbé

The images in my work can be seen as leftovers from a proces of remembrance.

Thru painting very thin layers of watercolour on a dry ground I try to convey a sense of loss to the viewer.The backgrounds are deliberately unstable, a drop of water could wash away the image... or a gust of wind could blow the image off the canvas, and with this a feeling of impermanence comes in that I find very beautiful.
In the act of remembering there is a melancholy about times lost and this comes to the work as well.

The small scale I used for this series suggests to me an intimacy but has a practical side to it as well; I have been travelling while making most of the images and like to record fragments of my surroundings immediately.

I made the works for this exhibition with Japanese Ukiyo-e prints in mind.

(Ukiyo-e was a style of popular art in Japan during the Edo period usually depicting scenes from everyday life.
Ukiyo translates as "floating world" - an ironic wordplay on the Buddhist name for the earthly plane, 'the sorrowful world')

The term 'floating world' is very acurate as far as I am concerned as nothing is stable and all is in a state of constant flux.So are my images.

Some derive from dreams, some stem from memory of people I knew, travels I have made, places I have seen.