Vincent de Boer at Studio Bosk

Vincent de Boer (NL) is the latest artist to spend a weeklong residency at Studio Bosk, Mini Galerie’s forest studio up in Friesland, the Netherlands.

I give him a call on his last day there, interested to hear about his background and whether some time in autumnal nature has had an impact on his creativity.

“Since I was young I’ve always had an interest in letter-making, in calligraphy. What I’ve been focusing on for the past ten years is how to create meaning beyond the embedded values already existing in the signs we know to be language. Besides that, to explore the boundaries of language as we know it. I focus on the gestural act of writing, away from any framed set of meaning. It belongs, if you will, to what we call asemic writing”.

I ask him whether he had any concrete plan for his residency, or whether he would let his new surroundings conjure up a spontaneous creative spark. The studio is surrounded by trees, far away enough from the local town to go days without seeing a single human being.

De Boer laughs as he tells me about an assignment he set himself, calling it slightly simple, or something he would make his art students go out and do. “I told myself to go into the forest and collect things, these objects from nature, and see if I can translate them into language.”

I’m curious about what he means exactly, by translating into language. He tells me about the meditative process of walking through the forest, stopping every time otherworldly shapes and patterns catch his eye. He takes photographs of these objects, “or subjects” (as he reminds me), and upon taking them back to the studio they function as a form of reference point.

“I start by making a drawing, not of the whole thing but just of one aspect that interests me the most, then from that drawing, a line appears, then another line, until I ́m six or seven . translations in.”

He calls every new move a new “translation”, so that what once started as a creative interpretation of a tree branch, or a leaf, is now an entirely new abstraction. Just like with human language, the more we translate from one language to another, or from generation to generation, the further we get away from the source, meanwhile new meaning and possibilities appear. “I’m entering a mystic triangle between drawing, writing, and painting that quickly builds a relationship with these signs, recognizing them, familiarizing them.” This is, in essence, what it means to create a new visual language, the attribution of new meaning between abstract signs.

Again, he laughs at how such a simple activity of “collecting from the forest”, has actually developed into something significant to his artistic practice. “As an artist, I interpret my surroundings into things that I and others surround themselves with again”. “But moreover, I like the metaforic value of this process, trying to attune to nature’s language while science is unraveling the communication of the forest.”