Rolf Weijburg is a Dutch graphic artist, specializing in
color-etching. His work can best be described as ‘travel-stories’, showing
colorful images of the places he travels to with details of flora and fauna,
architecture, every day life and landscapes intricately fitted together like
collages.
Rolf likes to work on projects, in series. Three large series of color-etchings
have thus developed these last years: ‘L'Afrique Périphérique – An Atlas of the
Islands around Africa’ consisting of over eighty five color-etchings, now
completed, and the still growing series ‘Home’ and ‘Local Beauties’. A new
project to create a series of etchings on the 20 smallest independent countries
of the world is now in it's preparatory stage and will result in the first large
etchings in 2003.
L'Afrique Périphérique
Could it be that the islands around Africa were all compact miniatures of
Africa, where sounds and smells and images of the whole continent were
conveniently washed ashore more or less untouched by time and preserved by
isolation? The islands like an African magnifying glass? It is this idea that
took Rolf on his numerous journeys to all the inhabited islands and island
groups around Africa between 1985 and 1998. These journeys provided the artist
with the inspiration for a large series of etchings showing the immense
diversity of all these bits of Africa.
Rolf Weijburg was awarded the Dutch National Prize for the Graphic Arts in 1992,
for the etchings of this series up to that point.
A large exhibition with over one hundred works in the Singer Museum in Laren in
2000 marked the completion of this project.
All of the 85 color etchings plus sketches, photographs and accompanying travel
stories (in Dutch) are published in the book ‘L' Afrique Périphérique – Een
Atlas van de Eilanden rond Afrika’ which was presented at the Singer Museum
exhibition.
Almost all of the etchings can be found in the French language edition ‘Mes
Carnets des îles’, which was one of eight nominated for the French National
Prize for the Artist's Travel Sketchbook 2002.
Many of the etchings of this series are now sold out. The etchings you find in
the Portfolio under ‘L'Afrique Périphérique’ are, sometimes in a very limited
number, still available.
Home
The ‘Home’ series was started upon his return from Yemenite Hadramawt in 1992
with the color-etching ‘Home: Shibam, Hadramawt’. It is a series about houses
and about where home is. About all those red dots on the map. The houses they
consist of, the people who live in them. Home away from Home.
Local Beauties
Years ago the artist received a postcard from Sri Lanka. The card was divided
into four rectangles with ladies in local dress in each rectangle. One stood
next to a house, one on a beach, one was standing in a forest and one had just
stopped picking tea. It was an old-fashioned postcard with colors that might
have been applied by hand. In the middle it read: Local Beauties.
For years, this card hung on the wall in the artist's house. Now the card has
got lost. But it's title has been preserved.
Reviews of Artist's Work
See what the
Princeton Packet writes about the artist.
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