Traditional Dutch oil painting is injected into digital photography, through the lens of self taught photographer Bas Meeuws. Each of Bas’s compositions are a result of painstaking work, creating layers of imagery, in the style of the original old masters. Bas says, “A flamboyantly undulating tulip can be constructed from five different photographs.”
Enjoy the splendor of Bas’s still life photographs, as he walks us through his Profolio…
This work (Untitled (#19) is my first flower piece made in 2010 after making a series of vanities still lifes. It’s in this period I decided to start working in the same way the Dutch Masters did in the 17th century, flower by flower. The glass vase in this work is a copy of a 17th century rummer.
Untiled (#55) 2011 won the Dutch Metro Photo Challenge Award in 2011. The tulips being showed in this piece were collected from the Hortus Bulborum in Limmen in the north of The Netherlands.
Untitled (#58) 2012 represents a period in which I shortly experimented with flower arrangements without vases. This work somehow looks a bit like a floral forrest. The big tulips and emperor’s crow act as trees. Butterflies and dragonflies fly through the canopy and ants and beetles crawl through the lower vegetation.
One single tulip is presented here.The flower books or florilegies of the seventeenth century were my inspiration. My tulip books are printed in 20x30 cm which is similar to that of the historical tulip books.
My wife choose this vase as a base for Untitled (#90) 2013, as a tribute to her. I made a circular composition in a square frame in which the tulips are larger than life. The left one was originally red and yellow but I had it taken in by hand.
Untiled (#101) 2014 is one of the first flower pieces out of my Eastern series. The vase used in this one is a Chinese vase from the Han-dynasty (200BC-200AC).
In 2014 I made Untitled (#106) as a commissioned work for a charity auction to raise funds for the renovation of the the Amsterdam University Children’s hospital (Emma Kinderziekenhuis). The Delft Tulip vase in collection of this hospital. A tiny portrait of Queen Emma herself can be found in the vase, as well as a portrait of the hospital’s first medical director, Samuel de Ranitz.
On 17 July 2014 a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with flight number MH17 crashed in the Ukraine, in a sunflower field in a war zone. None of the 298 people on board survived. This photograph serves as a permanent memento for the relatives of all victims, a piece of art that connects them to the location of the crash.
