(Paintings of men, viewed sexually, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
On my Pinterest feed this morning, this painting, a modern-impressionist portrait of a male couple, by an artist unfamiliar to me:
(#1) Niels Smits van Burgst, A Sunny Day in the Hotel Room (2013); the title is from the Pinterest album, but might not be accurate (see below) — certainly, this is an odd-looking hotel room (but I’ve found no other reproductions of this painting to check on the title, and haven’t found it on van Burgst’s Instagram page)
Whatever the title, the artist certainly attends to the male body (and to the lives of men). No Wikipedia page on him, but this thumbnail bio from the Gallerease [commercial artworks] site on him:
Niels Smits van Burgst is a Dutch visual artist from the Netherlands that graduated from the Royal Academy in The Hague in 1993. Smits van Burgst specializes in oil paintings, working in an almost impressionist style. The subjects of his paintings are rather special. He searches the internet for private pictures that are shared in order to use them as subjects for his paintings, which leads to paintings that are like stills of a movie. His paintings show the daily life or ordinary people, romanticizing them in a way. His works can be seen all over the world, in [exhibitions] in cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, New York and many more.
And then from the Ultrawolves site on the artist (with some basic copyediting by me), from 6/29/22:
Born in Maassluis, the Netherlands in 1970, Niels Smits van Burgst is a figurative painter whose work reveals moments of his personal life experiences and those shared with close friends and acquaintances. He currently lives in Rotterdam, where he works in a large studio near the Sparta Stadium.
Niels Smits van Burgst attended the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1993 and his Masters Degree in 1994. He committed himself in 1994 to depicting the experience of life awareness in his paintings. Initially he concentrated on painting private and personal experiences; over time, he gradually extended his work to include friends and people casually met through the course of life.
The main emphasis of van Burgst’s work is to show an identity, an understanding of what it means to be alive in Western society. His paintings, with their broad brushstrokes and cool palettes, provide the memories for their subjects’ life experiences. In many of van Burgst’s works, he presents images of men existing in a civilized world where their excesses, such as lust, aggression and euphoria, are personally suppressed. In society, however, excesses are still experienced by individuals through stylized media channels such as television, the internet, and film.
(On the blogger I’ve called Ultrawolf and his website ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog — “A Gay-Oriented Collection of Art Works, Literary Quotes, Songs, Films, and Male Images” — see his section of my 9/19/24 posting “Painter of the male form”)
Three more van Burgsts. From Ultrawolf’s site, starting with the painting (of a male couple, indoors) that Ultrawolf identifies as A Sunny Day in the Hotel Room (2013):
(#2) On van Burgst’s Instagram page with the title Back in the Hotel Room
Then a men-behaving-badly painting:
(#3) You Can Reach Anything (2011)
And finally, one of an enormous number of very gauzy paintings:
(#4) Banks of the River (date unknown)
[Addendum on 10/25, e-mail from Ultrawolf, who did a lot of clever searching:
I located his instagram site and his Netherlands site:
https://www.instagram.com/niels_smits_van_burgst/
http://www.svanb.nlThe Netherlands site is only updated to 2014; however, titles and sizes are given for his work from 2000-2014. I checked the titles in my posting and made a few corrections from what images were available on his sites.
The info for your article’s paintings is as follows (per the Netherlands site):
#1 The Summer is Magic, 2013
#2 A Sunny Day in the Hotel Room, 2013
#3 You Can Reach Anything, 2011Van Burgst’s Instagram site had this one:
#4 Bank of the River, 2019
The SEE/ME online art site has several of Van Burgt’s paintings in large format. You can really see the vigorous brushstrokes in those paintings:
So that’s all straightened out now.]
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