Press reports/interviews
2012: "Radiologist and artist", Handdruk UMCG, March 2012 p.18, by Johanne Levinsky
2009: "De Elfde Onafhankelijke Realisten Tentoonsteling, Museum Mohlmann Appingedam
Kees Thijn, "Pleidooi voor een Gronings Pulchri", Dagblad van het Noorden, 29 januari
2008: Jan Kiewiet,'Kalkoenen zien er in het zonlicht fantastisch uit , Dagblad van het Noorden, rubriek Cultuur, pagina 7, 14 november
Eric Bos ,"Voor een appel en een ei" in Pulchri-blad, jaargang 36, nr.4, pagina's 9 en 10, oktober
Kees Thijn,"Gicléeprint, hoe denken wij erover?", Pulchriblad, jaargang 36, nr. 2
2007: 6de editie Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte Contemporanea (Florence/Italia), pagina 728
2005: Pulchri-magazine no.4 'Kees Thijn en zijn symbolische wereld". pagina 4
Wim van der Beek, "Vetgemeste varkens als welvaartverschijnsel".
Deventer Courant en Overijsselse pers
2003: Isabelle Werkhoven, "Ongelikte schoonheid de liefhebber Kees Thijn".Dagblad van het Noorden, januari
2002: Wim van der Beek, "Chirurgische ingrepen lappen wormstekige appels op". Deventer Courant. 03 oktober
2001: Kunstkatern DGP, 7 maart
2000: Eric Bos,"Kees Thijn schildert wolken als vette watten",Nieuwsblad v.h.Noorden,2 december
Interview NCRV-radio
Interview Radio Drenthe
1999: Met palet en tekenstift: Tussen magie en realiteit, jaargang 5,nr.282
1998: Bart Koenen, "Magisch-realistische expositie in "Het Markiezenhof", Bergen op Zoom, De Gazet, november
Kwartaaluitgave Museum "Het Markiezenhof", november
Persbericht Drents Museum, oktober
Rita Hulsman, "Kees Thijn - Het oog van de radioloog", Arts en auto nr. 16
1997: "Expositie Kees Thijn", Vriezer Post, 12 januari
1995: "Werk van Thijn te zien", Nieuwsblad van het Noorden", december
1991: Cor Rodenburg, "Schilderijenexpositie Thijn is gang naar het Gemeentehuis waard", Vriezer Post, oktober
"Kees Thijn exposeert in het Bruggebouw", Emmer Courant, augustus
1986: Hans Redeker, Hedendaagse Portretkunst in Nederland.
Read more...Literature
2011 Kunst in het UMCG - Een selectie uit de kunstcollectie van het Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen. ISBN 978-90-367-4794-3
2008 Diederik Kraaijpoel, Mechteld de Bois, Eric Bos and Jan Kiewiet, "De viering van het leven", november
2005 Harry Tupan, Eric Bos e.a., "Kees Thijn en zijn symbolische wereld", Waanders uitgeverij. ISBN 90-400-9069-6
1998 Mechteld de Bois e.a., "Kees Thijn -schilderijen". "Tussen magie en realiteit",
ISBN: 90-70884-66-6
1991 Evert Musch, brochure "Kees Thijn, 25 jaar schilder"
October 2008. Eric Bos,
About an apple and an egg
The painter Kees Thijn did not have an official training or studied at the academy of art. He is a physician of origin, a former radiologist. Painting is a way to give form to his thoughts, so he says. You could say, what does it matter, if you have studied at the academy or not, important is the fact that you can paint, that you can express your inner motives, rational or emotional. It is not about the common thoughts, but about something more deeply, something that even a radiologist cannot perceive with his instruments. If we look at the work of Kees Thijn, we in fact look about in his head. His landscapes represent his world of thinking and the symbolic-surrealistic way of giving form to it says something about his inner feelings. Paintings can make something visible that no X-ray unit or brain scan can reveal. As we contemplate the fine-art work of Kees Thijn we could be inclined to think that without any education you can paint as good as an artist with a training at the academy. Both have their own peculiarities and quality. Those of Kees Thijn consist of the consequent planning of his landscapes. Everything is done exactly in the same way. Clouds, sky, apples and pears, eggs and birds, turkeys and insects, vases and hearts, they all show strict loyalty to the possibilities and restrictions of the artist. There is no room for diversions or drastic changes. It should not be. The landscapes of Kees Thijn are what they are and so it should stay. If you like it or not. It does not matter, it is a question of feelings, emotion and perception. The progress in his technical skills is not emanating from theoretical experience, but from hard work, from continuously striving to perfection, the long experience and routine. Apparently Kees Thijn is the creator of fantasy worlds, but in fact he just paints what he thinks and feels. Why should he paint something else? That’s why the peculiarities of Kees Thijn which characterize his work are evident. Kees paints landscapes, but you see immediately that they are no ordinary landscapes. They are more like landscape poems. A good poem tells you more than a nice metre or a beautiful doggerel. So it is also with the landscapes of Kees Thijn. All the shown attributes are as we come across in real life, but in the composition they form a surprising, fantastic whole ignoring the laws of perspective, gravitation or nature. We never see the sky with clouds as Kees Thijn paints it. But he sees it, it exists in his head, it is the only cloudy sky that his brain, by way of his painter’s instinct, is revealing to him and us. They look like sea waves out of card board on the stage of a baroque theatre. Often they tear open somewhere and unmask a next world, a hereafter behind the horizon. Because of that we know for sure: the cloudy skies are fake. They are of paper, plastic or card board. You can jig-saw in it, you can put the scissors in it. The apples of Kees Thijn, which are appearing in almost all his landscapes, sometimes form a stacking like a group of Chinese acrobats which in reality would fall over immediately. That is the same for his eggs, fragile phenomenon’s, which burst open or fall apart into tenth’s of shell splinters. Hearts bleed, milk is streaming through blood vessels, strings coming from heaven seem to refer to the earthly life and the after world. The packing twines of God . His skies sometimes look like religious visions, with attributes which are surrounded by an aureole or where the divine light is glowing behind. Is his work about such spiritual profoundness as mortals and God? Church and world? The ones who know the work of Kees Thijn already during some time, know also that the painter is not representing religious or serious themes so much. For example the farewell, deterioration, perishableness, as they are represented at their best by the rotting apples, shriveled up and all, out of which sometimes the whole core has disappeared so that you can look right across it. Eggs fall apart, die in fact by giving birth to new life. In any case that new life exists of brains provided with fresh blood. Body-organs play a prominent part in his paintings. Hearts and blood vessels are already mentioned before. All that an X-ray unit, relating to human internals, has revealed to him during his life, is living a second life in his work. His landscapes are about connections, cycles, as on the painting “Eternal cycle of life” from 2008. Life and death, and all what is in between, the cycle of lifeblood, of mother nature, of the universe. And of our energy to live, inclusive the light-hearted indications to the male and female genitalia and mammalia. You do not need to be an educated realist for that. It is not about Realism. It is about metaphors, personal symbolic, partly recognizable to us. It is about not measurable aspects as the way of thinking, the vulnerability of the objects, the extinguishing beauty which is reborn in another form. It is also about identical forms in nature. Such as an apple that looks exactly like a mammal, or a porcelain vase that plays the part of a fragile egg, where it does not matter that everything is looking artificial. Kees Thijn says somewhere; form and significance melt together. And so it is exactly. Melting forms and lifeblood are hardly distinguishing from each other. And he does not refer for nothing to the ‘nature that permanently fascinates with her amazing shaped forms’. Represented poetry it is. Poems for an apple and an egg, for a cock and a turkey, for a butterfly and a ladybird. To make it short, for mother nature. Nature where everything comes together and everything has a meaning, everything that is hidden for us. And for the time. Poems for the time which is after all associated to every cycle of life. To express that you can be a self taught artist without any concern. It is only necessary that you paint what you feel and what your mind tells you to make the invisible visible. In order that we can say: it does not exist, but it is fully convincing.
Eric Bos,author,art critic, artist and teacher at the Classic Academy Groningen
If we look at the work of Kees Thijn, we in fact look about in his head. His landscapes represent his world of thinking and the symbolic-surrealistic way of giving form to it says something about his inner feelings. Paintings can make something visible that no X-ray unit or brain scan can reveal. As we contemplate the fine-art work of Kees Thijn we could be inclined to think that without any education you can paint as good as an artist with a training at the academy. Both have their own peculiarities and quality. Those of Kees Thijn consist of the consequent planning of his landscapes. Everything is done exactly in the same way. Clouds, sky, apples and pears, eggs and birds, turkeys and insects, vases and hearts, they all show strict loyalty to the possibilities and restrictions of the artist. There is no room for diversions or drastic changes. It should not be. The landscapes of Kees Thijn are what they are and so it should stay. If you like it or not. It does not matter, it is a question of feelings, emotion and perception. The progress in his technical skills is not emanating from theoretical experience, but from hard work, from continuously striving to perfection, the long experience and routine. Apparently Kees Thijn is the creator of fantasy worlds, but in fact he just paints what he thinks and feels. Why should he paint something else? That’s why the peculiarities of Kees Thijn which characterize his work are evident. Kees paints landscapes, but you see immediately that they are no ordinary landscapes. They are more like landscape poems. A good poem tells you more than a nice metre or a beautiful doggerel. So it is also with the landscapes of Kees Thijn. All the shown attributes are as we come across in real life, but in the composition they form a surprising, fantastic whole ignoring the laws of perspective, gravitation or nature. We never see the sky with clouds as Kees Thijn paints it. But he sees it, it exists in his head, it is the only cloudy sky that his brain, by way of his painter’s instinct, is revealing to him and us. They look like sea waves out of card board on the stage of a baroque theatre. Often they tear open somewhere and unmask a next world, a hereafter behind the horizon. Because of that we know for sure: the cloudy skies are fake. They are of paper, plastic or card board. You can jig-saw in it, you can put the scissors in it. The apples of Kees Thijn, which are appearing in almost all his landscapes, sometimes form a stacking like a group of Chinese acrobats which in reality would fall over immediately. That is the same for his eggs, fragile phenomenon’s, which burst open or fall apart into tenth’s of shell splinters. Hearts bleed, milk is streaming through blood vessels, strings coming from heaven seem to refer to the earthly life and the after world. The packing twines of God . His skies sometimes look like religious visions, with attributes which are surrounded by an aureole or where the divine light is glowing behind. Is his work about such spiritual profoundness as mortals and God? Church and world? The ones who know the work of Kees Thijn already during some time, know also that the painter is not representing religious or serious themes so much. For example the farewell, deterioration, perishableness, as they are represented at their best by the rotting apples, shriveled up and all, out of which sometimes the whole core has disappeared so that you can look right across it. Eggs fall apart, die in fact by giving birth to new life. In any case that new life exists of brains provided with fresh blood. Body-organs play a prominent part in his paintings. Hearts and blood vessels are already mentioned before. All that an X-ray unit, relating to human internals, has revealed to him during his life, is living a second life in his work. His landscapes are about connections, cycles, as on the painting “Eternal cycle of life” from 2008. Life and death, and all what is in between, the cycle of lifeblood, of mother nature, of the universe. And of our energy to live, inclusive the light-hearted indications to the male and female genitalia and mammalia. You do not need to be an educated realist for that. It is not about Realism. It is about metaphors, personal symbolic, partly recognizable to us. It is about not measurable aspects as the way of thinking, the vulnerability of the objects, the extinguishing beauty which is reborn in another form. It is also about identical forms in nature. Such as an apple
that looks exactly like a mammal, or a porcelain vase that plays the part of a fragile egg, where it does not matter that everything is looking artificial. Kees Thijn says somewhere; form and significance melt together. And so it is exactly. Melting forms and lifeblood are hardly distinguishing from each other. And he does not refer for nothing to the ‘nature that permanently fascinates with her amazing shaped forms’. Represented poetry it is. Poems for an apple and an egg, for a cock and a turkey, for a butterfly and a ladybird. To make it short, for mother nature. Nature where everything comes together and everything has a meaning, everything that is hidden for us. And for the time. Poems for the time which is after all associated to every cycle of life. To express that you can be a self taught artist without any concern. It is only necessary that you paint what you feel and what your mind tells you to make the invisible visible. In order that we can say: it does not exist, but it is fully convincing.
Eric Bos,author,art critic, artist and teacher at the Classic Academy Groningen