Hans Janssen
Raised from its ashes. He already had on a very young age the disposal of a great talent. This also remained not unnoticed at school. The headmaster of the school advised him to apply himself to the drawing and painting art.
His visit to Paris has taken him completly under the spell of its beauty of art. His visit at Musée d’ Orsay acquainted him with the impressionism. His admiration went especially to Renoir, Degas and Manet.

His many journeys around France made him acquainted with the landscapes and the cypresses in the storm as Van Gogh recorded that in his paintings. Van Gogh saw it that way and so he saw it in the same way. The waving trees, the wild turning clouds, only a great master could be able to paint this in this manner on the undefiled white canvas.

Detail self-portrait 2004
At a young age, he has, next to his own works, copied many paintings of Van Gogh.

But its greatest admiration went in actual fact to Rembrandt. Not only the impression of light and dark, but also the so often praised compositions and brush strokes.

After his visit at the Louvre in Paris he was very disappointed when he behold in a small, rather hidden away corner, the collection of its great example Rembrandt. Not the masterpieces he so admired, but his disappointment was about the extremely small amount of paintings from Rembrandt in such an enormously big museum.

When in 1980 he decided to live together with his friend, money became important. He went to work at an advertising agency. Now, after twenty years, he has given up its job and has picked up its old passion again.
Own work

Despite his admiration for the impressionism, he went his really quite particular own way. Who behold his work recognizes immediatly that he created that painting. His passion for light and dark remained with him.

What makes his paintings so exceptional can be seen as a form of protest. This protest is comparable to that small corner in the Louvre.

His work is about males, but then exclusively about males. He rarely finds he a nude study of a male in a gallery and when there is one, the male is rarely reproduced in its full glory, the male as it really is.
Wet Oil paint on linen canvas 30 x 40 cm