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This is me, drawn by Janneke Tangelder on the 13th of February 2001. The drawing was a birthday present and it comes with a story.
From sixteen until twenty four I was a member of a group of volunteers that organised exhibitions, performances and concerts in my home town Neerijnen in the Betuwe. In those days we had the use of Het Stroomhuis, a former transformer station of the electric supply company. It lay at the edge of a wood, a meadow away from my parent’s house. It was the sort of disused, solid and peaceful industrial building where you immediately feel at ease. Brick walls with metal emergency stairs running along them, stone stairs with metal banisters, pale yellow and black tiles on the floor, numerous passages and rooms with iron doors – and three magnificent naturally lit rooms. Art galleries in the big cities would kill for such a space.
We organised about six exhibitions annually. With each new exhibition and each new performance Het Stroomhuis seemed like a different building. You could do anything with it, maybe because it had lost its original function. There was no heating, so we could only use it in spring, summer and autumn, even then we often had to keep our coats on as the thick walls held onto the cold for a long time.
The first exhibition of 2000 consisted of paintings, drawings and prints by Wendelien Schonfeld and Janneke Tangelder. Here I actually got to see a large amount of work by Janneke for the first time. The great breakfast still lifes. Train passengers. Lots of pencil drawings depicting figures in smoky cafes.
We spent three days in the beginning of April on the installation and everyday there was an upbeat and happy atmosphere in Het Stroomhuis. As it happened, the first day was my birthday. Wendelien had brought some homemade cakes from Amsterdam. Janneke had come to Neerijnen with twenty-three candles. They had a pot of daffodils with them, not just for my birthday but also to celebrate the spring. On top of this I received two framed… not sure how to describe them. Drawings of heads in profile, where instead of faces there were thin chains which you could move and shake so that all sorts of different faces appeared each time. I remembered these kind of games from my childhood, just like I remembered blowing out the candles. I was an old fashioned birthday boy that day.
The chain faces actually represented something else, as was written on the back. I was allowed to exchange one of them for a portrait of myself, to be drawn by Janneke. The other one could be exchanged for a portrait by Wendelien.
I posed ten times for them in 2000 and 2001, an afternoon each time in their separate Amsterdam studios. These sessions were always just as festive as the birthday in Neerijnen. Wendelien and Janneke made food and jokes and drawings. They stared at me and I stared back at them. It was interesting to see how differently they worked. Wendelien was very serious when it came to the drawing. She would sit straight up and with a deep concentration, stare intensely at me and her drawing. She produced one or two complete drawings during each session, often using several colours. She would listen to what Janneke and I discussed, saying little herself. If she felt like making a contribution she would stop drawing for a while and carefully concentrate on what she had to say. It always made sense.
Janneke would sit all relaxed, with her legs crossed and a small sketch book on her lap – that is, if she sat at all, because she would often walk around. In order to better understand the dimensions of my body or head she’d move a little from right to left, backwards and forwards. When she returned to her original position, it wasn’t her old position anymore: she now knew what she couldn’t see from there. Sometimes she would draw while walking, scratching passionately with every step as if she was moulding me with her pencil. She made lots of small sketches per session.
Eventually it wasn’t just the one portrait I got from Janneke. She gave me a pile of drawings, and even after a few years she would come up with another drawing she had found somewhere. I think I’ve got the whole lot of them at home now. She also made a painting of my head based on sketches and photos, but she doesn’t think it looks like me. ‘It could be a brother of yours.’
The drawing shown here is especially interesting because it also reveals a bit of the interior of Janneke’s studio boat. By standing or sitting there for whole afternoons I got to know the place very well. Behind me is Janneke’s piano, which she uses to study her singing parts and holds choir rehearsals with. Since then a bookcase has been built around the instrument, but ten years ago framed works by befriended colleagues hung above it. To the right you can just see the kitchen door opening.
The walls, floor and ceiling of the boat really are as white as in the drawing. All the white painted planks are illuminated by the daylight pouring into the boat fro

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