Gabriëlla Cleuren

"I paint my memories in 'Cleur : colour' ' almost every day, and as you know, memories are always a very own world, but also universal. Nothing human is strange to a human being. For that purpose I use a free form and a personal language of pictographs."
 
'I was born in 1942 in Kleine Spouwen, a picturesque village in the Limburg between Maastricht and Tongeren along an ancient Roman route to Cologne. A Roman military road ran behind our house through the fields and I often played as a child in the ditch : splashing barefooted in flowing water that was then still unbelievably clear, populated by beetles, salamanders and other water animals.
The world of my childhood was a wonderful world of romping with frisky lambs, hauling water from the spring, and, at the old village school, marvelling at the displayed wares of a ragman, who sat beside the road and had such fascinating, colourful children's watches and splendid, lovely rings you could buy for a sack of rags.
Perhaps, this atmosphere was the foundation for my art, reconstructing what I experienced, felt, observed, dreamt, in short, writing down memories in my own pictorial language using only parts of the reality, fragments of memory merged into a free composition and form, sometimes with a dividing line in between.
The reality is virtual and important insofar as it comes across as a comprehensible image. The color is often psychologically loaded : each image starts with myself, my thoughts and becomes very often universal. Like another might write a diary, I paint mine, almost every day.
Since 1997 working at the computer, my work was influenced by its specific language. I started adding pictograms to my work to explain and talk in an individual, psychic, introspective creative way (the last I always did).
One day a week I spend my time in a museum or in galleries : I regularly visit Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Paris, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Thus, a short introduction to my work'.