Esther Schlebos

Residency period: February 2021
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Esther Schlebos is an artist whose medium is painting. Her often large-format works are primarily oil paintings -using also charcoal, pastel or watercolor for her sketches and landscape studies.

Being Geology another of her passions -due to their extensive diversity, their formal and chromatic richness, as well as the long history they contain – stones are for Schlebos an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Her paintings are capable of collecting this complex materiality whose details immerse us in the infinity of time.

The motifs compose narratives beyond their meaning, but above all, they are the container of the full pictorial potential. The large format and the multiplicity of layers of paint allow us a visual experience with an intense tactile quality.

In Blanca, she has been fascinated by the nakedness of the landscape, the mountains that reveal their structure and show, on a large scale, the details that she observes in the small stones she observes with her magnifying glass.

The relationship she establishes with her paintings gives life to the supposedly inert matter she portrays, showing the rocks as creatures that change their charisma according to the light, Esther confronts us with a material and at the same time imaginary experience.

During her residency, she has been able to paint in the landscape to take notes of the surrounding morphologies and has developed a color palette that is completely different from the one that she, being from northern Europe, is used to.
What is presented are the first layers of a work that can only be completed in her studio due to the slowness of the oil when drying and the difficulty of transporting with her canvases with thick layers of paint. Her wish and intention are that once they are done they return to Blanca to be shared with the local public.

“This residency has opened a door in my artistic life that cannot be closed again, and I hope to be able to return soon for a new inspiring stay”

The residency has been granted by the Stichting Kunst & Cultuur, CBK Emmen and the Mondriaan Fonds.