House painter by day, artist every other waking moment
Houtsma’s work combines abstract, colour, movement
WATERLOO — Siebe Houtsma is getting a little tired of climbing ladders while loaded down with buckets of paint and brushes, so the house painter has decided to get more serious about his other brush and paint-related activity.
“You don’t make money in art,” admitted Houtsma, though he has decided to slow down his business and focus more on abstract painting.
Houtsma’s exhibit “Simply Abstract: Paintings by Siebe” is on at the Princess Twin Cinema’s Oden Gallery in Waterloo until the end of November. The works display a unique approach to interpreting nature, which is his usual inspiration, particularly the Bruce Trail and Lake Huron coastline.
At 60, the largely self-taught St. Agatha artist is keen to spend more time in his Kitchener studio, an old factory shared by a number of artists. Though he considers himself a loner, Houtsma does enjoy meeting up with the other artists in the building, chatting, sharing ideas.
“The fact they’re (artists) there, there’s a bit of a vibe,” he said. Artists tend to be a transient lot so there is always a steady stream of new tenants. New people, new ideas.
It’s this sort of creative interplay that keeps Houtsma motivated. But his job as a house painter gives him ideas, mostly about using unusual materials in his work.
In some of the pieces in the exhibit, he’s incorporated jigsaw puzzles as a background. Painted over, the edges of the puzzle pieces are faintly visible but only when viewed from a certain angle. He’s used burlap, punched holes in the canvas and strung wire through the openings, and he’s even added bits of metal.
Houtsma, the son of Dutch immigrant parents who hoped their only son would pursue a more practical career, really didn’t know what to do after high school. He’d been copying characters from comic books but didn’t start drawing until his teen years.
In the late 1970s, Houtsma studied art at Sheridan College. The course included photography designed to teach students how to see the world in a unique way. He’s taken that lesson and used it in his art. A large canvas entitled “Secret Garden” features a soft summer field filled with flowers enhanced by stabs of green. It’s his favourite and perhaps most ethereal painting.
In another painting, “Golden Moon,” the images of bright green trees against a red background are enhanced by a large solid yellow orb, the sun.
Houtsma became fascinated with orb-shaped objects once he learned to see the world as a series of interesting patterns in the photography course at Sheridan. The image viewed through a camera lens might be rectangular, but the world he saw was not.
“It was then I acknowledged the abstract,” he recalled. “Combine that with my love of colour and movement.”
His paintings indeed are filled with colour and movement. But there is one more ingredient, more important than inspiration: passion.
“If I’m not passionate during the creative process then it becomes more of a mechanical activity,” he said.
The artist also likes to experiment with various media including wood, glass, paper and paint. He has worked in stained glass, made papier-mâché masks, and now he’s focused on painting. Painting, he said, means being in the right head space and that requires a bit of planning.
“I have to be in the right mood,” he said. “Sometimes, it can take me up to year to finish a painting.
“You have think, ‘what’s the next step?’”
Houtsma often has half a dozen unfinished canvases, all in different stages waiting for that final burst of inspiration that will put brush or palette knife to canvas.
He never really plans anything; it’s all about standing in front of that blank canvas and unleashing his imagination.