Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Marjolijn Thie
Article 65 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the September 12, 2007 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Emerging Landscapes
The art of Marjolijn Thie mirrors the movement of her life, reflecting the various phases of her travels and of her inner growth. From a childhood in the Netherlands to the wilds of Canada's North, to the pastoral farms of Isle d'Orleans, the alpine vineyards of Switzerland and finally home to the Gatineau Hills, Marjolijn has been painting the world as she sees it, both outwardly and inwardly with remarkable depth.
"I was lucky as a child. My mother was very connected to nature. She would take me on long walks by the lake near our village. She knew the names of every flower. I went to a two-room schoolhouse where the principal was a well-known painter who brought us to study the Dutch Masters in the museums of Amsterdam. He also gave me private lessons - just watching him paint taught me so much."
Two weeks after she married in 1967, Marjolijn followed her young husband to Winnipeg where he studied forestry. Every summer they would go on field trips to the North. After a short stint as an elementary school teacher, Marjolijn enrolled in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba where Ken Lochhead, Ivan Eyre, George Swinton, Robert Bruce and Don Reichert became her professors. Discovering the Group of Seven and the work of Suzor Cote and Clarence Gagnon was a revelation, combining with her European roots to influence her emerging style.
For a while her own painting went underground as she raised her family. Working on commission, Marjolijn perfected the exacting detail of Dutch decorative art on antique furniture, banisters and vintage milk cans. However it wasn't until a move to Quebec in 1988 that she finally felt free enough to allow her own painting to resurface.
"The landscape was inspiring - first those old farms on the Isle d'Orleans - they were mysterious with a feeling of old France. And then the land itself! My life had been so busy and my home so eclectic. Suddenly I began painting these tranquil, minimalist scenes where I eliminated much of the detail, giving just a suggestion of the St. Lawrence. I wanted shapes, pale colours, greys and blues. It was so calming."
And again on a move to Switzerland in 1998 a deeper freedom emerged. They lived in a village in the Jura Mountains near Geneva, a wine district filled with the golden light of a Van Gogh painting. After spending each day hiking, Marjolijn began to experiment with abstracting the landscape into bands of colour and light - blue hyacinth and yellow dandelions in waves among the vineyards.
Upon their return, they moved to the Gatineau Hills in the autumn of 2004, where Marjolijn discovered another inspiring landscape. The hills and river released a flood of paintings, some abstracted into shapes reminiscent of her earlier Quebec paintings, others with the mysterious depth of an old Master. Last year alone she sold 35 paintings.
However it is in the exploration of her Dutch roots that the fire has truly emerged. Her passion for the tulip has ignited her work - first in a series on the history of the tulip, capturing on canvas the Golden Age of the Tulip when one bulb in the 1600s might cost as much as a house. Then in the abstraction of fields of tulips into pulsing bands of brilliant colour. And finally in its most recent incarnation - the tulip as love song - as dialogue between the explosive detail of the flower itself and the colours that give it life.
Marjolijn's work is cyclical, developing in an oscillating rhythm of freedom and restriction. Out of what she loves certain shapes recur, returning at a greater depth with each move, bearing her both further out and further in on her journey of exploration. In the fullness of time landscape and the woman emerge.