Artist Statement
I paint still-life series of objects I encounter in my daily life.
For me, objects tell a story, especially those which have a connection with people and their encounters.
I work with water-mixable oil paint, watercolor, pencil and pastel.
My process is spontaneous and involves experiences of connection with people that I come into contact with in my daily life.
In my painting, I portray the ingredients of human exchange, emotion, reflection, and meaning.
As a psychiatrist, I am most interested in the unvoiced ingredients of connection,
which we as humans express indirectly through our choices of particular objects and how we interact with those objects.
Objects help us to express the unvoiceble, the most intimate details about us.
I started a still-life series of roses after a colleague gave me roses as a thank you for our conversation
earlier about a shared difficult experience. In these still-life-series paintings,
I express our similar painful experience which we cannot express to others.
The series began with fresh roses and concluded after ten paintings with dry roses.
My colleague and I see the drying of the roses as the process of dealing with our painful experience.
Karl is another series of 5 paintings of a male mannequin. Somebody said that this mannequin deserved a name and she called him Karl,
and other people agreed. During the painting of this series, it became clear to me that Karl has a connecting role between people,
and that Karl's expression expressed my state of mind without me realizing it. An object that was a mannequin,
became Karl who developed a relationship with me and others.
By creating still life series of everyday objects, I explore the role these objects play in our daily human communication
and are a means of saying what is unspeakable, unvoiced, unutterable. Objects, even trivial, help us to utter the nice and ugly,
the happy and painful. With my series I hope to be able to invite others to recognize and acknowledge other aspects of their
communication and so find comfort and answers.
Bio
P. Roberto Bakker is a Venezuelan-Dutch painter living in the Netherlands. Roberto creates still-life series with water-mixable oil paint,
watercolor, pencil and pastel. His work centers on daily objects which are connected with human encounters. With his work,
Roberto explores themes of human communication and connection. Although his life's practicalities led him to a professional career in medicine,
science, and teaching, he has always been profoundly creative.
Since 2018 he has been taking lessons in drawing and painting and he became inspired in making oil paintings and drawings of
semi-abstract paintings of daily objects symbolizing human connection and communication. Human connection is central to his work as a
psychiatrist, the medical specialty where communication at different levels is an important tool of diagnostics and treatment.
With his paintings, he hopes to discover more about what human connection and communication means.
Roberto earned his:
- Medical Doctor in the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Master of Science in Genetic Epidemiology in the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (Nihes)/Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
- Bachelor's degree in Humanities Arabic Language and Culture in the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- PhD in the Department of psychiatry and psychology at Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Roberto works as a psychiatrist in a mental inpatient clinic in Psychiatric Centre Arkin and in his own practice in Amsterdam, as a researcher in the Academic Workplace at Arkin and University of Amsterdam, and as a honorary research psychiatrist in the Department of psychiatry and psychology at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He is a member of several national and international scientific societies.
Roberto paints 16 hours per week, next to his work as a psychiatrist and researcher. This combination of activities has a synergic effect, and Roberto hopes to pass this on to others. At this moment, he is preparing an exhibition.