Contributor Saskia van Loenen editor-in-chief NRC Handelsblad. A house full of
That I came into contact with the work of Fransje Versloot was purely coincidental (which is actually absurd, because why hasn’t this woman long been so famous that every art connoisseur immediately starts nodding eagerly upon hearing her name? – more on that later).
In this case, on November 8, 2013 – the day Joost Zwagerman gave a glowing speech at a luncheon at the Fotomuseum after the opening of a joint exhibition with artists Harald Vlugt and Pieter Bijwaard in the adjacent Gemeentemuseum – fate led me down an ugly street toward The Hague Central Station, through which I passed at a fast pace: the train to Amsterdam was already about to leave. And without seeing it coming you suddenly find yourself at a fork in the road, one of those moments that later prove to be crucial, the moment when you decide whether or not to do something: while running, out of the corner of my eye I saw a beautiful painting flash by. I hesitated, stopped, quickly retraced three steps: that’s beautiful. If I didn’t keep running, I would miss the train for sure. A short hesitation, two steps forward, three steps back: look again. Yes, I see, how is it possible: this is indeed exactly what I have been subconsciously looking for for years – this is what I want. By now I accepted that it would be a train later and took a good look through the shop window. I saw a kind of gallery space and had to press my face almost flat against the window with my hands above it to get rid of that annoying glare. Now I could see it better, that sea of gray strips. Really beautiful. I saw even more beauty, also many colorful ones, several canvases that made me happy on the spot. And that was nice: I had just been in an oppressed mood – something about a lover who had made me feel uncomfortable during the brief moment when we could finally sit together on a bench for a while because he was once again in doubt mode – and these paintings made it a successful day in one fell swoop.
By the way, the gallery was closed; too bad I couldn’t go in. But there was a flyer of workshops given by what must have been the painter, including a website, so I took a quick picture of that. I also quickly took a picture of the painting of the in-the-passing-look, although thanks to the mirrored window it was only vaguely visible in the picture. No matter; this would have a sequel anyway.
I ran to the train that was scheduled to leave 10 minutes later.
Back home I immediately looked at the website of Fransje Versloot, because that was the name of this still unknown artist. I fell from one surprise into another: I saw several more works that I would like to hang on my wall. Many seascapes too; I doubted whether the one I had seen was exactly the same as the one on the site.
I decided to email Fransje. A few weeks later I drove by car to The Hague, where she would be again that day, in that same gallery, where she had brought some similar sea works especially for me, plus a few other canvases that were not on her website.
In the studio gallery, I saw the canvas I had initially stopped for. The colors were just a bit different up close and without a window reflection; with more beige tones than I had thought. I myself do not like beige or brown, very much like shades of gray, but the other grayish seas were not exactly what I had in mind either. But there was hardly time to be disappointed about that, because Fransje did conjure up a number of other canvases, including a painting not on her website that showed a combination of purple/red and gray sea lines. I was immediately sold. This would be a huge upgrade to my living room. Which desperately needed to be stripped of all the elements that reminded me of my former roommate.
And so I drove back home, with a little daughter folded double under the fresh cloth in my too small car. Very happy I was. And there would be enough “gray seas” in the coming years, Fransje had assured me, so one day the gray sea would surely be there. But for now I was ready. At home I hung up the canvas and from that moment on I looked at the beautiful colors hundreds of times a day.
The contact with Fransje had been pleasant from the first second, we did have a “click” as it is called. Since then we mailed or emailed each other sporadically. And of course I regularly saw her work on Facebook. It seemed like she was getting better and better.
Occasionally I would look at her site when I felt the need to see beautiful things. Easier than having to go to a museum every time. There were new works on it regularly, and at one of them I immediately felt an itch inside. Goddamn, how beautiful. I emailed her a picture of that painting, wrote that purple was totally my color and was curious about the size. ‘The City’ was the name of the work, although it consisted mostly of those abstract stripes I love so much. It turned out to be quite large and because the canvas was standing it could not be placed above, say, a table or cabinet. This work needed a wall empty from bottom to top. I looked around to see where it could possibly hang, but there was no place – right next to the canvas I already had would not be a good idea in terms of color combination. And other vertical pieces of wall weren’t there. Difficult. It was so beautiful. But no. A painting had to be able to hang.
A year later, on May 24, 2015, I drove to Joure: Fransje had organized an open day, and finally my schedule and the children’s visitation schedule allowed me a day away from home. For the first time I saw that beautiful large space where she worked and received clients – space like you won’t find anywhere in the suburbs anymore. I looked around at my leisure and also saw the new purple one – it was even more damn beautiful in real life than I already knew. Made for me, in every way. But it just didn’t go – you’d almost move to a house with more square feet of wall for it. Fortunately there was a lot more hanging there, including a beautiful canvas in a smaller size, namely square, of a sea, made of shades of gray and a hint of purple. A square canvas would have fit where I otherwise would have wanted the purple one. And with this canvas, too, something happened. I walked on again, yet back again. I raised a glass with Frenchy to her beautiful work, meanwhile glancing across to where it hung. Each time my gaze was drawn to it. Fransje told me about the canvas; she was extremely pleased with this very work: more than successfully beautiful. It was also called ‘Wadden’, which was an extra incentive for a Texel-goer like me.
But there was so much more that excited me. In the workroom behind the exhibition hall there were also dozens of works, and when Fransje got a better idea of what my colors were and what I liked (gray, purple, blue and horizontal lines) she pulled out a few canvases from the stacks leaning against the wall. Pats! Suddenly I was on the beach, all alone, enjoying the elements. I was looking at a blue sea scene: various blue and blue-gray horizons, a stunning effect. Moreover, there in that depot were several smaller and even smaller sea works, in different color schemes. These too were several images that I kept staring at longer than was good for me.
That I wanted to go out here with a canvas no matter what, was a given at the time. Now only to see which one.
That turned out to be quite a problem. The lamps in the exhibition hall gave the canvases a different color than in daylight, and in that light I could only really judge a canvas for my home wall. And so several times Fransje took canvases from their official hanging place to put them on the floor for me in the depot. A quick look, photos, and the canvas went back – after all, there was an audience walking around the main hall. Wavering, one more time in daylight that one please. French happily kept smiling.
Buying a painting is not something you do lightly. It has to be right on all sides, in terms of colors, shapes, size, atmosphere – and especially in terms of what it does to you. The problem in this case was that several canvases did something to me. I decided to put all potential candidates – there were about ten of them – side by side. To drop one, however beautiful, after each critical look. It was like judging on The Voice. I first grouped canvases that had much in common in terms of scene. Three horizontal canvases with seas: two of them had to go. Just as with the small ones (such a miniature painting would look great at the top of the stairs), the medium format (across from my bed in the attic!) and the large square canvases. In the end, four top canvases remained that way.
How to move forward?
I was just staring at it, those four in a row. Walked all over the house in my mind, several times, imagining what would hang where and what I would enjoy most.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that further elimination was no longer an option. I wanted both that small painting, with a beautiful turquoise sea that reminded me of the Caribbean for the top of the stairs, and that rustic gray sea that I could look at from my bed, and that blue sea for above the TV, and the biggest one: the square gray Wadden with purple details.
It felt like something big, like a truly special, defining moment, when I heard myself utter the words, “What will be the price if I take all four at once?” something that really couldn’t be done in my situation (as a single mother who has to do everything on one income, I can fortunately do a lot, but decadent things like expensive vacations I really have to leave behind). Still, I knew I had to do it. I had a couple of difficult years behind me on a personal level, which had caused me a lot of stress, I was permanently working my ass off, and with a full-time job and three children I had to keep twenty balls in the air at the same time: in order to stay afloat, I had to give myself something for once, I decided. Besides, I reasoned to myself toward the purchase, I would derive so much joy from beautiful things everywhere in my home that that would serve as a stress-inhibiting factor. These canvases would make me happier. So do it.
When I actually said that, “Okay, I’ll do it,” I filled up. I felt like I was taking a big step in more ways than one. So these were tears of pure happiness.
Singing, I drove back across the Afsluitdijk with a fully loaded car. A friend helped me hang the canvases in the perfect spot. Everything I had thought up in my head turned out the way I had hoped. In bed I stared at my gray sea, the ultimate calming canvas in that spot. On the couch, I watched the blue raging waves more often than the TV below. Going up the stairs also made me take off in other ways, imagining I was back in Cuba or Jamaica. And the big square Wadden Sea of gray and purple made my living room ten times more beautiful in one fell swoop – I looked at it when I was in the kitchen, when I was eating or working at the table, and in fact all the times I walked from the couch to the kitchen. As did the first canvas, by the way – it too, despite this new, brilliant competitor, retained the appeal of being visually too beautiful to ignore in passing.
By now I had a house full of Frenchies.
On September 8, 2015, the art- and literature-loving world was rocked by the suicide of Joost Zwagerman. The man who had, in fact, caused me to spot Fransje’s sea painting on my way to The Hague station, for it was for him that I had traveled to The Hague that day.
I always had a lot in common with Joost; I enjoyed his books, but also his essays in the Volkskrant (I almost always agreed with him), and later his TV appearances in De Wereld Draait Door in which he hoped to teach a large audience love for art with fiery monologues. Sporadically I had contact with him, mostly by e-mail, but I didn’t really know him personally, and no, I never ‘had something with him’ I write here again, because some people around me really thought so, probably because when I mentioned his name I always said ‘that’s exactly the kind of man I like’. But this aside. I just want to say: Joost was an exceptional man, had exceptional talent, talents I should say, and Joost had taste.
Saddened by his passing, I spent those weeks staring more than average at the paintings that had already given me so much beauty over the past few months.
Later I heard from Fransje that Joost Zwagerman had spoken to her a few years back and was full of praise for her work. ‘The greats of the world were called in. I felt like a princess,’ she wrote to me.
And so this too came full circle.
Had Joost still been alive I am sure that a painting by Fransje would have come up at some point. Maybe then it would have finally been picked up by the great art experts of this country. Something that should finally happen now. And not many decades too late, when Fransje is no longer around please.
Two years later, on June 10, 2017, Fransje once again organized an open house, this time of her new studio in the factory on the Slachtedijk, combined with “sit-down dinner” to which I was also invited. Among Fransje’s artistic friends I walked past familiar and new works. And as can happen on good days in a museum: suddenly a jolt. There hung that big vertical purple one. The one I had had to let go due to lack of walls. Since then I had been intensely happy with the alternatives, but this purple one touched me again from the first second, it seemed to be beckoning, beckoning – I could not ignore it. Each time I walked back for a moment. Took pictures. Searched feverishly in my mind for a piece of wall at home that I had forgotten. Or where something now hung that could be replaced by this one.
Moreover, during the delicious and, thanks to the type of guests, inspirational food, my eye was caught by a gigantic canvas standing on the floor; a gray sea that in terms of coloring was exactly as I had hoped for the very first canvas by Fransje that I had seen in quick passing in The Hague. No beige this time, just shades of gray. I gasped. This was him. My ideal sea. But if that purple one was already too big, this one certainly was, albeit in width this time. But god almighty, how beautiful this was. This was the sea as I wanted to see it. Every day.
Two weeks later, at my request, Fransje sent some photos of the vertical purple and the horizontal gray next to each other, on an otherwise empty wall. Now I could judge them better – and they were even more beautiful than in the studio, which was littered with paintings and thus colors. I walked through my house just one more time. And suddenly I knew. On the upstairs landing, across from a large mirrored closet, was another virgin white wall. I had skipped that option until now because, of course, you don’t hang a top canvas around the corner on a landing. But, eureka: precisely because of that mirror I would see it much more often than just when I stood right in front of it, namely every time I went upstairs.
And even for the huge gray one a solution presented itself. The also enormous photograph of Henny Vrienten (my first childhood sweetheart) printed on hardboard was beautiful, but also very dark, with a lot of black. And it could also stand on the floor in the attic. The free space then created above the dresser in the living room seemed made for a large, reclining canvas. And that sea of gray matched the other colors in my living room like no other. What was extra nice: it would hang next to my very first red/gray/purple sea, and those colors would match perfectly.
Fransje did something about the price if I would take both of them, and although this was, nevertheless, again a decent amount of money I knew I just had to do it. Of all the previous canvases I had bought I had not regretted a second, what am I saying: they had more than paid for themselves considering the dose of happiness they brought me every day. If you were to convert the purchase price into happy days, it really is a pittance what you have to put down for that every day.
And so not long after that, on a beautiful summer’s day, Fransje drove to my house in Broek in Waterland, in her enormous station wagon, which proved its services again with canvases like these. We put the purple one upstairs (my father would come the day after to put the screws in the wall); the effect of all those beautiful lines and colors in front and behind was already overwhelming. It would chase me up the stairs more often than necessary from now on. We could already hang the big gray sea together on the screws of Henny Vrienten. Two steps back, ten: unbelievable – it hung even more beautifully than I had dared to dream. As if the canvas had been made especially for that spot.
Since then, Henny Vrienten only cheers me up when I’m in bed, in the attic that is. Although I look at my little gray sea much more often than at the attractive singer. Climbing the stairs has been a feast for years, with the turquoise miniature tableau next to the bathroom door and immediately after that the purple splendor in duplicate in front of the mirror cabinet – I never get upstairs without looking to the right.
But the living room beats everything. It is finished, but really finished (especially since I recently bought a rug that looks like a copy of the blue horizons above my TV, so that now I am permanently floating on the couch in its blue sea, even when I look at the ground), and has become the territory of Fransje Versloot. With no fewer than four canvases, all with horizontal lines but each with completely distinct atmospheres and color settings, I often don’t know where to look from happiness. Nothing on TV, too tired to read? Thanks to these works, every day at home guarantees soothing, visual pleasure that brings a smile. Never a lost moment again.
French’s works are addictive. In a fire, I save the children first, and immediately after that these paintings.
I hope the children will later come out of it together without too much fighting, dividing the seven wonders. But until I die, they are mine. I can never be without them again.
