Marie Louise Elshout

Curriculum Vitae

De duistere doeken van Marie Louise Elshout weerspiegelen haar verlangen naar de negentiende-eeuwse Romantiek waarin het waarachtige centraal staat.

De wereld die zij optrekt wordt bevolkt door melancholische wezens die zich lijken te laden met de kracht van de Natuur, dwalend in een eigen wereld met hun eigen geheimen en rituelen.

Door haar verfijnde techniek waarin ze potlood met olieverf vermengt ogen de figuren fragiel, als vage schimmen uit het verleden.

Haar werken zijn een zoektocht naar de verbeelding van schoonheid waarin techniek en intuïtie nauw samen gaan, vanuit de intuïtie is er ruimte voor dwalingen, manifestaties op het doek, in het haar, de kleding.

Elshout weet het esthetische te mengen met gevoelens van claustrofobie en onderhuidse dreiging, uitgedrukt in nauwgezet geschilderde kunstwerken.

Painting, to Marie Louise Elshout, comes closest to her other passions: nature and romanticism. What truly fascinates her, are the ambivalent (read: love/hate, tender/cruel) relationships between human beings and animals, adults and children, leaders and followers. In her paintings she tries to emphasize on taboos that often create cruelty and fear, abuse and loneliness.

Starting point for her paintings are photographs form 19th Century landscapes, mainly set in North America, where pioneers conquered land, fighting and defeating nature. At first sight, they were building a new life, a new future, but Marie Louise wants to show the dark side of this experience.

Without any respect for nature or the local population, these people were acting out of self preservation and their deeds were mainly fueled by self interest. Marie Louise wants to capture these dark aspects of mankind, expressed in meticulously painted works of art.

She feels familiar to artists like P.J. Harvey, Marina Abramovic, Jerzy Kosinski, Ian McEwan, David Lynch and John Steinbeck, all of whom she admires for their force, their purity and their alienating abilities. Without concessions they show, each in his/her own way, neurotic and destructive powers that drive us, human beings, in this life.

Marie Louise’s paintings are of an extreme beauty, beautiful messages of pain and painful messages of beauty, the viewer is divided between attraction and repulsion.

One needs to be a very strong and determined artist in order to have the courage to mix feelings of aesthetics with those of claustrophobia and fear.

Her latest bodies of work are titled 'Virgin Forest' it refers to ancient, primal woods, governments know by far that planting trees can save this earth but instead of planting them they keep cutting them, money and corruption dominates.
This planet’s last primeval forests are slowly turning into wood factories.
Modern Western society finds itself on a threshold, we are more and more degenerating into cavemen, decay instead of progress.

In 2016 Marie Louise Elshout was nominated for the Jacob Hartog Prize, which is given each year at the Pulchri spring Salon.