Menno Baars Foundation. Menno Baars, Dutch contemporary artist. The vivid canvases by Menno Baars look like finger paintings by demented children, with faces from carnival mirrors. An ordinary medicine cabinet opens onto a jerky silent film of morphing faces, toothpaste and disembodied heads. An utmostly lively structured, colourful surface evolves. It resembles a kind of skin that consists of various colours interfering with each other and creating new shades. People in relation to each other, increasingly abstracted, expressed in colours and shapes. They all tell tales of joy and melancholy, attraction and rejection, flippancy and eternity, chaos and orderliness, rationality and emotion, but obvious humour is the key element in Baars work. Baars loves the immediacy of the procedure. Baars allows his visual language to evolve from his unconscious, without being controlled by reason. It's a sensuous process. One can descibe his primitive imagery and energetic work by a thick application of paint, violent colors and vehement broad brush stroke combined with childlike naïveté. Like other Dutch artists as Van Gogh and Appel he seeks to convey a profound, spiritual message. Van Gogh's painting too is a vehement, visceral identification with paint, making of it a living substance. And as with Appel, there is in Baars art a lofty ideality and purity of contrasting primary colours. Baars is an artist and a cardiologist working state of medicine-art. ´The irony of starting medicine rounds is that I attended the hospital and left a changed man`, Baars said about himself, "I don't think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this. I experienced a profound change as a person working for the sick and the deprived, and that day sat off my life´s most creative period so far." Being both physician and artist is undoubtedly one of the reason critics dismiss his work as a form of commercial art. When asked about the "commercialism" of his work, Baars said: "I could earn more money if I stop being a physician but I won't. My art is an extension of doing my rounds, breaking down barriers from illness to health, from captivity to freedom." The work of Baars has been incorporated in the collections of celebrities and royal families. JFK Airport NY permanent exhibit "Understanding New York", a large original Baars. In 2008 Baars made a claim to fame by throwing paint out of a helicopter over an airplane and in 2009 Menno Baars painted the front sail of a racing yacht in the Volvo Ocean Race whilst sailing. In 2010 he gave a huge hot air balloon the Baars make-over and in 2011 he painted a BMW art car.

Menno Baars Foundation

Menno Baars, Dutch contemporary artist.

The vivid canvases by Menno Baars look like finger paintings by demented children, with faces from carnival mirrors. An ordinary medicine cabinet opens onto a jerky silent film of morphing faces, toothpaste and disembodied heads. An utmostly lively structured, colourful surface evolves. It resembles a kind of skin that consists of various colours interfering with each other and creating new shades. People in relation to each other, increasingly abstracted, expressed in colours and shapes. They all tell tales of joy and melancholy, attraction and rejection, flippancy and eternity, chaos and orderliness, rationality and emotion, but obvious humour is the key element in Baars work.

Baars loves the immediacy of the procedure. Baars allows his visual language to evolve from his unconscious, without being controlled by reason. It's a sensuous process. One can descibe his primitive imagery and energetic work by a thick application of paint, violent colors and vehement broad brush stroke combined with childlike naïveté. Like other Dutch artists as Van Gogh and Appel he seeks to convey a profound, spiritual message. Van Gogh's painting too is a vehement, visceral identification with paint, making of it a living substance. And as with Appel, there is in Baars art a lofty ideality and purity of contrasting primary colours.

Baars is an artist and a cardiologist working state of medicine-art. ´The irony of starting medicine rounds is that I attended the hospital and left a changed man`, Baars said about himself, "I don't think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this. I experienced a profound change as a person working for the sick and the deprived, and that day sat off my life´s most creative period so far." Being both physician and artist is undoubtedly one of the reasons many critics dismiss his work as a form of commercial art. When asked about the "commercialism" of his work, Baars said: "I could earn more money if I stop being a physician but I won't. My art is an extension of doing my rounds, breaking down barriers from illness to health, from captivity to freedom."

The work of Baars has been incorporated in the collections of celebrities and royal families. JFK Airport NY permanent exhibit "Understanding New York", a large original Baars. In 2008 Baars made a claim to fame by throwing paint out of a helicopter over an airplane and in 2009 Menno Baars painted the front sail of a racing yacht in the Volvo Ocean Race whilst sailing. In 2010 he gave a huge hot air balloon the Baars make-over and in 2011 he painted a BMW art car.

Painting is a sexy process. When I paint an utmostly lively structured, colourful surface evolves.

It resembles a kind of skin that consists of various colours interfering with each other and creating new shades.

Menno Baars 2011