Hubertine Heijermans

Hubertine Heijermans is a figurative painter, a multi-plate etching artist, Swiss printmaker and engraver, living in Canton de Vaud, Switzerland since 1958.

Hubertine Heijermans was born in Amsterdam. on 8 January 1936. She was educated at the Barlaeus Gymnasium, took painting lessons from 1954-1957 with Jos Rovers, and then studied for 2 years at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam with professor Gé Röling (1904–1981). In 1958 she met Nils, born in the Netherlands, but a volunteer and an officer in the British Army during the second world war. They got married and settled in Lausanne, where in 1960 their son Anian was born. From 1968 until 1972 Heijermans studied etching technics at the American highschool Villa Schifanoia, of the European Section of Rosary College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois USA, now Dominican University, and in Fiesole, Italy. The school was run by Dominican Sisters. In order for her to not remain all day in the convent, her etching teacher Swietlan Kraczyna found a studio in a palazzo overlooking Florence and the river Arno. In 1972 Heijermans won the Premio Brunelleschi (a Florentine prize for painters and sculptors) with a series of seven oilpaintings of a young Haitian woman, honored by Piero Bargellini the Mayor of Florence. Then she returned to Villars in Switzerland with her heavy etching press Bendini-Bologna, who is not electrically driven, but has to be turned by hand. The couple divorced in 1973. Nils died in 2001 in the South of France. Hubertine Heijermans still lives and works in Switzerland as an artist-painter and graveur Suisse since 1958. She now, in 2015 has her own artist Studio, Atelier 'Hubertine', situated in Canton de Vaud since 1981. She has been painting in Spain at the Costa Blanca since 1996 until 2006, because she would drive her car from Switzerland through France and Spain during 2 days, as hibernating in the Province of Alicante had become possible financially and she had the freedom to leave for 3 months in the winter. She still paints at home, but graphic artwork like etching has become too heavy. Yet, paint and a canvas are never far away, as painting is possible up to an advanced age. And as long as one is healthy a painter also collects a lot of experience and uses his capabilities to the maximum. Her paint got more substantial depth and she is obviously now mentioned more frequently, therefore people can find more about her work and person, since she also published a book about her life and art work, which one can read in the BCUL in Lausanne, the Bibiliothèque Cantonale Universitaire de Lausanne, since 2009. Her painting technics are definitely impressionistic, but her material is perfected with underlying coats of mixed white and lead white, which adds and enriches the oil paint and allows the material to become more alive and expressive. She remembers also the valuable but rare lessons of the famous Florentine painter, Pietro Annigoni who showed her to make paint herself with tempera technics. At the age of 80 she now prepares oil paintings about musicians playing the flute or she paints a series of nudes - models one can today find even on TV or Youtube. This artist-painter indeed lives with her time. She is also present on Flickr since April 2016.

This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). The full text of the article is here →

More ...