Born and raised in England, Valerie attended Edinburgh University in Scotland where she studied languages and philosophy. After graduating she moved to Paris and was a translator for many years. Her love of languages continues to this day. She speaks seven languages including Mandarin Chinese. From a young age Valerie had always been involved in art, yet it became more important in her life during her twenties. In her early thirties she made a career transition and decided to devote her life to art.
While living in Paris, her early works, inks on silk, were mostly of Japanese, Mexican, and Art Deco influence. In 1979 she moved to the United States with her son, and settled for a while in San Francisco. Her contact with this city proved to be a turning point in her artwork. In San Francisco she evolved from figurative to abstract and from inks to oils which she felt were the ideal medium for capturing the light and space that were to become dominant features in her work. Later she transitioned to acrylics for greater freedom. Since 1995 she spends her time between her Los Angeles and Paris studios.
In her early years as an artist, Valerie exhibited her work in numerous galleries throughout California, France and Switzerland. Wanting to devote more time to her craft, she transformed her residences in Los Angeles and Paris into galleries for private exhibitions. However recently she has once again begun to show her work in public galleries.
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ABOUT VALERIE VAN GELDER’s ART, IN HER OWN WORDS:
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ON PROCESS…
Chinese art, philosophy and calligraphy have been major influences in my work. I am particularly attracted to the spatial aspect of Asian art, gravitating naturally towards large graphic voids and exploring all the possibilities of surface organization by relating quiet empty space to dynamic sign. When a canvas is permeated with a lot of empty space there is more room for my imagination – and that of the viewer – to roam. The canvas starts off as empty space and I need it to return as much as possible to that state.
Color is very fundamental to my painting although it is not something I think about consciously when I begin a work. Nevertheless I generally have periods when one particular color, for some reason, vibrates with my psyche. The painting seems to be the means to access my inspiration rather than the inspiration a way towards the art. It is after I have painted – seemingly by chance – a series using that color that I will think and write about it. (And it is also why we have chosen to organize the works galleries by color, although you’ll notice that this isn’t a perfect science).
I generally start each painting with a clear mind, or if I have some idea it very quickly morphs into something else. The aim is to render one’s emotion. I paint what is in my subconscious, not what I see, nor an impression of what I see. The initial movement of the brush sets things in motion and yet its consequences cannot be foreseen. I often paint layer after layer in quick succession until color acquires a certain vibrational quality and some tenuous structure starts to emerge. Basically I like to surprise myself! It is at that point that the canvas captures my interest.
Each new work is a totally new experience where chance plays a large part – a fresh immersion in the dialogue between form and fluidity, light and dark, expression [often in the form of calligraphy] and emptiness. I see my painting as a capturing of the moment, like an image caught in the act of vanishing. At one point [hopefully] some subtle balance between chaos and order will emerge. I only know what I have been searching for when the picture is completed. This occurs when it feels free. The work itself is an exercise in liberation. In the end the painting should appear effortless and this is an invitation to the viewer to be free to feel whatever his own psyche spontaneously dreams up.
The viewer is invited to simply “like” [or not like, or indeed be indifferent] to what he sees. What is important is to be open, to be receptive on an emotional rather than on an intellectual level – in other words to not feel the need to understand. Indeed, in abstract art, which cannot be defined in terms of specifics, where points of reference are sparse, there is a need more for ignorance than for knowledge. Trying to understand or feeling the pressure to say something [anything!] is the enemy of enjoyment. Where there is effort to understand there is no pleasure. Such feelings as communing with color, light and space, energy, depth, balance, mystery…. are of the essence, without the need to express these feelings in words.
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ON ART AND PARADOX….
Paradoxical statements have been used throughout history to define the essence of what we call art. Picasso calls art a lie that tells the truth – or a true lie. Ovid claims that nothing is more useful to man than those arts which have no utility. According to Quintilian the height of art is to conceal the art, whereas Oscar Wilde argues that art’s aim is to reveal the art – but conceal the artist.
Paradox, the juxtaposition of opposing terms, is something that is deemed true though it may look false. Paradox removes time and space between opposites thereby creating a space – a kind of no man’s land – which is none other than the aggregate of opposites minus the time which ordinarily separates them. The suppression of time – paradoxically – lands one right in the heart of it.
The purpose of art is precisely to express timelessness or what could better be termed presence. But in presence there is no time for expression, hence the assertion that art can only express the truth in terms of a lie. Likewise, in the absence of time, no separation exists between the art and the artist. Creation occurs – without a creator. Hence the claim that art’s aim is to reveal the art but conceal the artist. However the art revealed must not look like art, i.e. an object in time. It needs to remind us of what cannot be attained, only experienced. If the height of art is to conceal itself, art needs to not look like what it is.
How true is it that nothing is more useful to man than those arts which have no utility? Art, Ovid says, has a deeper use than the face value of things, corresponding to what we feel to be important. When one thinks of the importance of art, one may think of the importance of beauty. And the thought of beauty brings to mind the concept of truth. The poet Keats said, “Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty.” Both, indeed, are in the circularity of life. Just as art is not simply the creation of the artist but changes according to the viewer, so beauty is what occurs between who is looking and what/who is looked at and is looking back. Beauty is impossible to define but we know it when we see it. Why this is so is finally one of those questions one has to think about to the point where thinking ends. How to think the absence of thought – a place where the contrary of truth is also the truth – is the realm of mystery. Parts of the mystery get solved along the way, but in the end [and in the beginning] maybe the purpose of mystery is not to solve it but simply to keep it alive.
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ON COLORS…
WHITE/BLACK
White has the power to evoke a suddenly meaningful silence. This is how Kandinsky defines a color, which, in reflecting all others, is able to impart a feeling of wholeness on the beholder. White is not a single color, but an unbroken mixing of every visible wavelength in the palette of the sun, and as such expresses a state of perfect symmetry and equilibrium where all energies, all forces, positive and negative, are united and at rest. Van Gogh considered white to be the highest combination of red, blue and yellow [the primary colors] in their lightest state, and black to be the highest combination of these same colors in their most concentrated state. Indeed, just as white reflects, black absorbs all colors.
The Chinese esteem black as the color, which, above all others, expresses both the world and its inexhaustible essence. In the West black symbolically is the color of death. In China white is worn at funerals – not to denote mourning but to herald a state where life and death are one, where death is not opposed to life. In the yin yang philosophy the polar opposites – life and death, day and night, black and white – necessarily embody within themselves the possibility of change, for each is seen to produce, imply, contain and ultimately be the other.
RED
Red is a color of extremes, a color evoking the energy of primal life forces encompassing everything from sunsets to the roseate tint of our insides. Red confounds in its many meanings for it is magic itself. Indeed in all cultures around the world it is the color associated with magic and mystery. Upon merely seeing red the metabolic rate of a human being supposedly soars. However it can excite the emotions both positively and negatively – too much red can cause anger and hyperactivity, too little and we become cautious and dull. Red conjures up many different hues. Everyone has their favorite red. These can range from soft rose reds, the orange tints of scarlet and vermilion to the bluish hues of crimson, or the purple of burgundy. The secret of red is in its combination with other colors to induce a feeling not only of vibrancy but also of serenity, thus creating the right balance of intensity without agitation, warmth without harshness.
YELLOW
Yellow is vagueness and luminescence both. There is an eerie quality, a mysterious ethereality, an other worldliness of sorts associated with this color. Yellow is the color of sunshine, in which we are all awash. The sun shines from one source and shines alike on all. And yet yellow, like the sun, for all its dramatic inalterability, is a color with a thousand meanings. So few colors give rise to such feelings of ambivalence – in one instance evoking glorious luminosity as in the birth of spring or the beauty of autumn, in another conjuring up the disturbing estrangement of decay and dissolution. An opposing duality seems mysteriously constant. Yellow indeed can be all things to all people. It is a color to be entered into according to one’s personal vision and emotional preference – each of us attuned to our own set of values and aspirations.
BLUE\GREEN
The color green has been described as the image of life. Both blue and green are receding colors, which means they give a sense of space and promote a feeling of harmony with the environment. Green is the color of nitrogen, which is the largest component of the atmosphere. Blue is the color of depth, of emptiness, of the Void. Green is the color of balance. Indeed it is situated in the very center of the visible spectrum [red, orange, yellow, GREEN, blue, indigo, violet]. Blue is essentially symbolic of both dark and light – near black at night and almost white at the horizon by day. Blue water is often warm and deep, green water cold and shallow. Blue, however, is usually thought of as cool, yet the hottest stars appear blue.
In early civilizations green and blue were interchangeable. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the sky was referred to as green – green as living plants. It seems that our ability to perceive blue depends on a highly sophisticated retina – a relatively recent evolutionary event in the development of humankind. Everywhere in the world color names have entered a language in the same order. Early on, green included what we think of as blue, that is to say, blue\green was always a single word. Next they were separated under two names and the word added was always a name for blue. Thus in Chinese T’ang poetry the same character was used for sky-color and grass-color. Later even, the Latin word caeruleus was used to describe the color of the sea whether it be blue, green or turquoise, which can be either a kind of blue or a kind of green. Even modern poets tend to merge the two colors. “If all the green of spring was blue, and it is” – writes Wallace Stevens in “Connoisseur of Chaos”. Maybe green and blue are still essentially the same, and together as one are the color of our universe, of both life and empty space.