gonda's art gallery
" I have drawn and painted ever since early childhood. For many years I have been an enthusiastic but self-willed apprentice of Raph Huet's painters class at the Municipal Art Academy in my hometown Turnhout (Belgium - Europe). I practised interior design as well. For ten years however my main profession has been qualified nursing. After that, as a result of many years' walking and mountaineering my husband and I founded an outdoor shop . I took to painting watercolors on mountain hiking tours. Me and my friends Georgette and Bart have been sharing a beautiful art studio at my home address for many years now (Chateau d'O). Ten years ago my husband and I left the shop to the younger generation and since then we can devote lots of time to music and the arts. My husband sings and plays ancient music. Some eight years ago I discovered the joys of working clay. Since then I have been making glazed earthenware as well. In the meantime we bought a small disused goat farm in a forgotten hamlet in the Auvergne region in France. After having renovated the place we live there for about eight months a year. The tranquility, the intense contact with nature, the onspoilt people, the vast barn equipped for claying and firing ceramics... we feel like God in France!
Gonda's sources of artistic inspiration
" As a source of inspiration for her paintings Gonda consciously makes use of meaningless scrap without symbolic references. A totally original new form comes into being through an endless combination of these elements. The ultimate painting generates a silent force which creates unity in a chaos of forms and colors. This field of tension can lead to a feeling of elevation, expel fear, purify the individual. It is there that artist and spectator alike find consolation, a reason to exist, a shade of universal harmony while outside shattering reality rages on. During mountain hikes the elements of the landscape - rocks, ruins, bushes, stones, glacier ice, water and clouds - are creatively recuperated in the same way and recreated into the pictorial and lyrical form of a watercolor. So Gonda does not aim at simulation of neither the perceptible world nor trivial feelings and moods. She is looking for a formal unity; linking elements into an unbreakable whole and the experience of an exceptional condition which transcends day-to-day banality." J.F.C. Michiels
how to contact Gonda
Gonda Bastiaensen / Renier Sniedersstraat 73 / be-2300 Turnhout / Belgium (Europe)
telephone: 0032(0)14 436723 or 0033(0)473523974
e-mail: gonda1@scarlet.be
Gonda's favourite websites
The Internet Art Database. A searchable database dedicated to efficient classifying art on the internet.