Bentemarie Kjeldbæk was born in Harlev in 1952. A graduate of the Copenhagen Art and Crafts School (1969–1974), the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1976–1982), she did not share the concerns of the Young Wild Ones generation, emerging alongside it. This has conferred a more personal touch on her body of work.
Although rooted in a traceable tradition, her approach to painting is one of revisiting, rethinking and, ultimately, re-doing. In addition to her appreciation for crafts, which allows her to manipulate both materials and history, her numerous trips to Spain appear to have had a significant impact on her creative output. Indeed, she brings back vivid colours and dramatic subject matter such as market depictions, flamenco dancers or even bullfighting from the Iberian Peninsula. All these scenes allow her to demonstrate her technical know-how and sublimate her subjects with her line work, colour composition, lighting and general dynamism.
The artist herself gives us an insight into this visible influence: ‘I have been to Spain and Portugal to draw the sketches and have made a simple and concrete colour scale. It is the complementary colours that fascinate me the most, red/green, yellow/violet, blue/orange. They excite each other, but also give grey on the retina, so the colours become calm. I also use this double effect in the colours in the motifs. The Spanish food market lady with her fish: so are the two. The court lady and the princess in Velazquez’s “Las Meninas”, which hangs at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Joan Miró’s teasing figures, Salvador Dalí’s high-heeled shoes, the bull’s head looking at you, head figures and bi-figures, two colours, two figures. Many sketches are needed before the right one is in the basic composition, which can either be figures in vertical/horizontal, circle, arc or diagonal. I only paint in the very real colour pigments, and tear them myself in French turpentine and resin from the spruce trees. I paint on handwoven Belgian linen canvas, which I prepare in many thin layers of leather glue and titanium white. The sturdy canvas requires handmade blind frames because it pulls in the process. I love the old painting techniques, which are the ones I see in the great works at the museums’.
