Recling nude, 1988

Willeke Stubenitsky (1955) was born in Hoogeveen, where her father went into hiding during the Second World War. Later, they moved to Schiedam and Haarlem, where she, at 16, took painting lessons from Poppe Damave, a “Haarlem Vijftiger”, the group to which Anton Heyboer also belonged.

Although she had big plans to conquer the world, she went to Amsterdam to study Spanish, which turned out to be less exciting than she must have thought, because after two years she switched to the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague and in five years time – it was 1982 – she obtained her diploma in Free Drawing and Painting. With her husband, ceramist, pottery artist and translator Arnold Cohen, four children and her talent, she moved in 1990 from her beloved inner city of Amsterdam – 70 square metres, four storeys high – to their mutual farm in Wanneperveen, where they settled as artists. Her husband died in 2002. She has lived and worked since 1990 in her country house with a dream garden in the middle of the village street of Wanneperveen. She loves nature and is a citizen of the world. You can feel that in everything. The leaves on trees are not necessarily green to her, they can be any colour that comes to mind when she loses herself in her work.

Stubenitsky paints abstract, landscapes, beautiful portraits and sometimes objects. Her portraits are called realistic, but they are very detailed and intense, with penetrating touches of colour and light. She has sold many of them and rightly so. Her landscapes express her broad and deep mind. They sometimes tend towards Vincent Van Gogh but are too personal to compare her work to that of any other artist. Her abstract work includes paintings about children and death, deeply experienced grief, but also powerful erotic works about women in all their dynamism and beauty.