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| Ronald
Cornelissen, July 28, ink, pencil, watercolour, gouache and acrylic paint on
paper, 114,6 x 244 cm, 2018 |
Category:
interview/Subject: Ronald Cornelissen on his drawings/Author: Peter
Nijenhuis/Date conversation: February 1, 2019. Proofreading and editing: Chris Kennedy.
Ronald Cornelissen (Beverwijk, 1960)
studied at AKV/St. Joost in Breda from 1983 to 1988, specialising in painting
and monumental design. He has exhibited in The Netherlands, the US, Greece and
France. A solo exhibition of his sculptures was shown at Museum Boymans Van
Beuningen in 2010, under the title The
Horseman's Kitchenette, (When Demons Cook). He had a duo exhibition
entitled Ground/ground with Paul van
der Eerden at Drawing Center Diepenheim in 2015. Ronald Cornelissen is
represented by Galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris and Zurich.
When
did you start drawing?
I used to draw a lot as a child, but I
was never told you could make a career out of it. That realisation came when I
went to art school in 1983, where I focused on painting and sculpture. My
teachers there liked thick layers of paint. They also preferred paintings to be
abstract. When I moved to Rotterdam three months after graduation, I began to
realize more and more that this way of painting was not for me. I like to tell
stories, for me it’s about iconography. My interest in art started between my
sixteenth and twentieth, not fed by museum visits, but by music, comics and
things from American underground literature. In art school, however, narrative
was considered suspicious. If they told you your work was anecdotal, they meant
you had a serious problem.
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Ronald Cornelissen, 1-4 June, ink, pencil etc, 88,5 x 138 cm, 2017
|
How
do you know when a drawing is worth keeping?
The obvious answer is it has to be
finished. The question is, though, when is a drawing finished? I keep pretty
much everything I put down on paper, even when I feel a drawing doesn’t feel
right. I keep all my drawings, bad or good. After a while, a year maybe, I’ll
come across them again. Over the years I´ve learned you can turn a bad drawing
into a good one. It´s something I like doing. When a drawing is no longer quite
so fresh, I’m less nervous about screwing it up, as I´m less aware of all the
time it took to get it to where it’s at. Also I usually work on a lot of
drawings at once, that way it´s easier to let go of the idea that a particular
drawing has to be ´good´. And I never make preliminary studies. That way
everything is wide open when I start working, which is nice because in that
phase drawing comes easy, you can’t go wrong really. As I progress it gets more
and more difficult to manoeuvre, until I get stuck. And that is the stage a
drawing must be at in order for to finish it and turn it into something I
consider good. Now you have to come up with the right move. At this point I
might make what you would call a study, a small version of what I have so I can
try things out, often something quite arbitrary or perverse. You could say
that’s rather adolescent of me, but I see something very vital in precisely
such a seemingly mindless act at that point. It creates a tension between
sophistication and crudity that I like a lot. It also tends to give a drawing
something tragicomic and I like that.
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| Yusaka Hanakuma |
How
do you determine when a drawing is a good one?
In Japan they distinguish four types
of manga artist: bad and good draftsman without character, and bad and good
draftsman with character. The first two categories can be dismissed. The last
category includes the true masters, obviously. The third category, though,
should not be underestimated; it certainly has my warm interest. I love artists
that still work in the so called ‘heta-uma’ style, such as Yusaku Hanakuma and
Takashi Nemoto. In fine Art too I prefer work where the ugly or banal plays a
meaningful role. I admire Franz West for that reason. Charles Bukowski once
wrote: When the spirit wanes/ the form appears. That ties in with what I said
about manga styles. One of the things that truly counts in a work is character.
If that is missing, formality surfaces, the structural application of mere
tricks. It’s important to avoid that, even though it can be difficult when
you’ve been drawing as long as I have. Over time you get to know what works
well; it’s tempting to fall back on that knowledge. If you do, though,
predictability lies in wait. To avoid this I try to organise my work process so
that I end up painting myself into a corner. In that way, an emergency jump
becomes unavoidable. And that has to be exactly right, as I mentioned before.
It’s precisely that leap that can open the way to unforeseen results.
