His Work

Bernard de Wolff paintings in multiple sizes measuring 140 x 120 cm and 40 x 50 cm on canvas. His smaller artworks are ranging in size from 10 x 10 cm, 13 x 13 cm, 19 x 19 cm, 25 x 25 cm and the biggest of 36 x 36 cm. These smaller paintings are made from linen, cardboard and of course Bernard’s beloved oil paint. When starting off with a blanc canvas, Bernard first preps the material and makes sure he has a good base to start off with the layers of oil paint. Often his paintings exists of multiple artworks that he testing painted over. So when buying an art piece, it is unlikely you just buy one painting.

All Bernard’s paintings have a story to tell, the use of colours, the cities, the season, his state of mind. It is all expressed through his talent by creating his art.

Working with oil paint is not the easiest. Especially when working with the amount of layers Bernard uses, it can take several years for the painting to fully dry. Bernard thinks working on small canvasses results in the most beautiful art pieces, but it is more difficult due to the fact that the paint needs to be dry to be able to create another layer of paint. Because of the many layers and structure he creates, he jokingly calls his style of work: “Peinture braille”.

While painting with ink, he uses a brush, contrary to most other artists who use ink. Often when using ink, they use a pen to draw lines with. Whereas Bernard uses the ink as a tool to create spots and flecks. This way of using ink and a brush was used in the Chinese Tang dynasty around 618-907. Later on, In the fourteenth century Chinese monks introduced this style in Japan. Bernard does not think of his paintings in lines and planes, but as a full picture. From thereon he fills in the blancs with splashes of ink. The variety in density of the ink creates shadows and shapes which allows the spots and flecks to represent more the essence of a subject instead of a direct visual copy of the subject.

His paintings, both oil and ink are representing scenes and pictures and the longer you look at it, the better you see what it represents. In his ink paintings he uses just simple black ink and carefully strokes the paper, to create an image. As in an morphogenetic process.

Just as Bernard’s oil paintings, his ink paintings vary in size. He sometimes uses thick A4 or A3 paper, or even bigger. Nowadays he often makes the ink paintings on square pieces of rice paper, measuring 50 x 50 cm. The majority of the time he uses black ink, but sometimes he experiments with coloured ink, or washed ink when making ink wash paintings.