A graduate from the Constantijn Huygens Art Academy in Kampen (The Netherlands) in 1996, Jerry Veldhuizen dedicated more than ten years to the skill of painting portraits. Following an inner urge to broaden his horizon, he left (what he was starting to feel as) his narrow path. For a while he acted under the name of Basic Donkey Health Care, combining his painting with a publicly reflective attitude towards his own art and developments in general. From 2006 until 2012 he documented his artistic process in an (almost) daily blog on www.basicdonkeyhealthcare.nl If you are interested you can still follow Jerry's artistic progress on Facebook: www.facebook.com/jerry.veldhuizen.3

Jerry Veldhuizen lives and works in Heelweg, The Netherlands and teaches drawing and painting at ArtEZ Art & Design in Zwolle, The Netherlands

An important motive behind my work is the notion that classical standards like truth, purity and integrity are losing their self-evidence, both in an artistic as in a general sense. My work, paintings and texts wich I exhibit under the alias Basic Donkey Health Care, can be seen as a reflection on these developments. In my writings I try to approach things as openly as possible, I wonder about the wilfulness of people in embracing the superficial but I also fight my own tendancy for paranoia and bias. For me, being a visual artist means forcing myself to keep on looking behind what seems to be obvious. In my paintings, which I would call landscapes, a number of things merge. They reflect ‘a feel of the present’ and at the same time they offer a vision of an alternative. On the one hand my landscapes force upon the viewer a feeling of concern: the images are associated with destruction, degeneracy and transience. On the other hand they depict a desire for something else, a delusion, a longing for that other classical standard: beauty.

For more paintings by Basic Donkey Health Care go to:

www.flickr.com/photos/basicdonkeyhealthcareprogress/

www.flickr.com/photos/basicdonkeyhealthcareportraits/