Carine de Meester, painter
Painting wells up from deep within. For Carine it is a creative urge and a necessity of life: the desire to give a stream of emotions a visible form.
From the soul
She translates deep emotions, however excessive, into a convincing pictorial experience. Images from the unconscious are projected onto the canvas: an inner world of feeling trying to communicate from the soul.
Feelings become form and colour, up to the point where painting turns into a liberating rush. With every abstract painting something is reborn: boundless, free and uncalculated.
Expression over rules
Carine sees what she wants to see, not what inescapable optical laws dictate. An abstract painting lets go of every fixed form; intense patches of colour take on fleeting shapes and radiate light. Above all she seeks expression, and she experiences the expressive power of colour purely by instinct.
She does not paint an autumn landscape by working out which colours suit the season, but from the feeling that season evokes in her. To her, art is not applying rules of beauty but whatever expresses feeling. As she puts it: when you love someone, you do not measure their limbs.
Inside the painting
Once inside the work, she gives her imagination free rein. An automatism arises, as if in a trance, often a kind of action painting. She wants to become part of the painting by walking around it and working on it from every side, as in the sand paintings of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Then she steps back. Only after a period of getting acquainted does she see what she was working on. She is not afraid to change things, to break the image and transform it: sometimes there are five paintings within one. Every canvas has a life of its own, and she tries to let that life come through.
Harmony, light and atmosphere
She does not chase a painterly ideal and chooses the style that fits the mood of the moment, always longing for harmony, light and atmosphere. Some works combine an almost sober image with poetry; other canvases burst into a blaze of colour, or seem to call up fragments of an inner life.
Free to look
For Carine, a painting needs no complicated explanation. She gladly leaves viewers free in their own interpretation. Looking at an abstract work frees you from conditioned thinking, and you take it in the way you take in a piece of music.