Een dag aan zee, 1979

Leentje Linders (1942) completed her training at the Free Academy for the Visual Arts in The Hague in 1972. She specialized in painting, sculpture, model drawing, dance and especially etching.

Since her graduation, Linders has devoted herself to specialising and perfecting the old 15th-century etching technique. With this technique, she wants to draw a line between past and present.

In her art, Linders has planes flying above old sea maps or on a parchment background with dark texts in which famous names such as Leonarda da Vinci or Michiel de Ruyter can be discovered.

She reinforces these representations by using a number of basic colours, such as azure blue, turquoise blue, the dark blue of the southern waters, sepia, ochre yellow, brown – all colours of heaven, sea and earth – to remind us that we’re earthlings, that wood was the basic material of ancient ships, and that rust corrodes iron. But she never applies the colours in a systematic way. A pinas from the 17th century can be as steel blue as the hull of a frigate. A minehunter has the reddish-brown colour of old pinewood. The cockpit of an F16 can take on the ochre colours of Da Vinci’s flying machines.

Air and water, and the past and the modern unite in her etchings in a multitude of variations. Using original aeroplane plates and a self-willed collage technique, dynamic compositions loaded with poetry emerge. She creates graphic constructions in which visual elements and text fragments stimulate our gaze and our imagination and invite us to take a fantastic journey through time and space.