Cornwall VII, 1992

Charles Popelier is a Dutch painter who was born in Monchengladbach, Germany. He was educated in Den Bosch in the 1980s, at the Acadamy of Visual Art and Design St. Joost, after which he travelled around Europe to get inspired by the beauty of landscape and nature.

On his travels through France, England, Portugal and Spain, Popelier undoubtedly sees the landscape as we do. Even the emotions it evokes in him may be recognisable to us. But as an artist, as a painter, he sees reality differently. He dissects the landscape, fillets it, cuts out parts of it and then distills the most characteristic extracts from it. He digs into it and brings the soul to the surface. The surface of his pieces betray these explorations of the earth.

Popelier is particularly drawn to those earthy elements. Something emphatically recognisable in his paintings. “I often try to give a face to wastelands and other places that seemingly don’t matter. I often paint with dye pigments bound with the milk protein casein. The great advantage of this is that it creates a ‘breathable’ layer of paint,” Popelier explains.