Pieter Athmer
I was born in Copenhagen into a Dutch family as the youngest of five children. Shortly after learning how to walk, we moved to the city of The Hague in the Netherlands where I learned to draw and paint. From the age of thirteen, I went to boarding school in Staffordshire, England. During six years there, I learned to love Shakespeare and look through the lens of a camera. And I grew up, more English than Dutch. At nineteen I moved to Amsterdam and I still live there now.
I earned a Masters degree in Physics at the University of Amsterdam and immediately after graduating started to retrain as a stage director. Nowhere did I feel more at home than in the theater. For about twenty years, theatre was my world, and I collaborated on many theatrical performances, from opera to cabaret. That’s how I learned to look at people.
My son was born in 2003, a wonderful new start.
I started writing, for the stage and later for television. In 2014, I changed course and started focusing entirely on painting.
It felt like coming home – as if everything I had done in my life before then was the necessary preparation for what I am doing now.
Artist Statement
Every person deserves, and needs, to be seen. I like to see people, and through my work I try to let them be truly seen.
There is time in a painting. That time of concentrated attention translates to the vividness of the painting. I paint by observation because I believe in the value of constant change. Not one moment from the single eye of the camera, but hours and hours of experiencing life with my own two moving eyes.
My style of painting is free and intuitive, yet the results are realistic and my work is easily recognizable.
My style is not contrived, it is what emerges when I become one with the process, and work without intention.
Real people are not brand new, but used. I find all people fascinating and beautiful. I want to show them in the full glory of their life experience.