Luc Leestemaker

Art Brokerage: Luc Leestemaker American Artist: Luc Leestemaker (May 18, 1957 – May 18, 2012) was an American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Hilversum, the Netherlands. His interests in art, theater and communication led him to found an Amsterdam-based performing arts center; organize the Dutch art collective “Hart Poetry;” and for a number of years he headed Leestemaker & Associates, an Amsterdam based consulting firm specializing in the arts. With his contemporary abstracted landscapes as a solid foundation, more recent compositions, as “Voyagers” and “Map of The Wind” take the viewer into a new generation of abstract expressionism, in which landscape and abstraction increasingly merged. The most recent “Allegories” “Songs of the Unconscious” and "Haiku" explored even deeper layers of fluidity in his painting. In 2006 the award winning Canadian composer Vincent Ho (Composer in Residence at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra), used four paintings of the artist as inspiration for a chamber music work in four parts, titled “Four Paintings By Leestemaker.” Leestemaker’s paintings are exhibited throughout the US and internationally, increasingly becoming a part of major corporate and private collections. Two retrospective museum exhibitions were held in 2004. Boston Galerie d’Orsay hosted an exhibition with a selection of the museum works for the artist in 2005. The documentary “Swimming Through the Clouds” about the artist’s life and work, was screened at a number of film festivals around the world and broadcast by Link TV, a culture and arts satellite network. The larger canvases are first treated with a –thin- cement layer mixed with raw pigment powder, then worked into with acrylic paint and finished with an oil based varnish. This fresco technique on the canvas creates a layered luminous sense of the work which seemingly changes in different shades of light. The smaller canvases making up the sets of the “ Inner Landscapes ” are made with the palette knife, and create a rich, layered look to the work. Landscapes have become Leestemaker's preferred subject matter as he feels that it is in these ‘atmospheric landscapes' that he can both express his emotion/intuition of the abstract compositions as well as the universally understood language of landscape painting.