Jacobien de Rooij was born in Rotterdam, in 1947. The artist graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1970. Since then, she has produced countless monumental nature drawings, offering a contemporary incarnation of the Dutch landscape tradition. Her masterful technique secured her a teaching position in the Fine Art Department of the Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving St. Joost (St Joost School of Art and Design).
De Rooij depicts a wide variety of natural subjects: landscapes, animals, nature reserves, cultivated nature, flowers, plants, vegetables, fruit, crops, trees, vegetable gardens and deserts. However, in spite of their realistic aspect, none of her drawings are based on photographs or existing places. They all stem from the artist’s imagination, nourished by her perception of nature. This imaginative strength is complemented and supported by her technique. A mistress of chalk (as she is nicknamed) and pastel, De Rooij’s tools allow her to give a faint blurriness, a subtle ethereality to her images that place them in the realm of the imagined, not the reproduced.
Methodologically, her work stems from a need for expression more than a conscious act of creation. She never works with a particular idea in mind, but instead draws on personal experiences and real places that she progressively transforms into imagined scenes of nature. She dedicates as much time as possible to her craft, not distinguishing between eras or key works, creation conceived as a continuous flow.
This large catalogue of imagined vistas raises a question: what is our place in the world? Where do we fit in? In the real? Or in the illustrated imagined? A combination of the two perhaps, as the drawings suggest? De Rooij, fortunately or unfortunately, leaves the questions she asks unanswered.
De Rooij lives and works in Haarlem.
