Artist's visit: "Giving soul to stone", Frank Linsewski
I’m driving through a Utrecht "coulisse" landscape of meadows and patches of woodland, somewhere between Soest and Amersfoort. Just off the provincial road, I park the car near a large, classic barn with a massive gabled roof. The temperature is hovering around freezing and the wind is picking up. Feeling a bit lost, I wander across the yard in search of sculptor Frank Linsewski’s studio. Then, I spot a small sign with his name, and a muddy path leads me to a self-built structure with one side covered in transparent tarpaulin. Once inside, I find myself under a corrugated roof atop wooden walls, which in turn enclose a mini garden shed. Three students—baby-boomer types—are busy carving and sanding. In the center, a stove is burning, and there are two folding chairs where we take a seat. It’s barely warmer inside than out, but by the light of the fire and with a mug of hot tea, it’s quite manageable. Frank is completely bundled up in many layers of clothing, his outermost layer consisting of work trousers and a lumberjack jacket; his face is mostly hidden beneath a beanie and a hood. He looks like he could have been a rolling-tobacco smoker, but he smokes filter cigarettes. He’s too young to be a baby boomer, but retirement age is approaching. On the wall hang several photos of works by Brancusi and Giacometti. “Where there is no will, there is a way” is one of the mottos written on the wooden wall. Opposite that wall—where the transparent tarp offers a view of the fields—lie numerous blocks of stone, tools, and a beautiful piece made of wood and stone, in which the materials bend back and forth like the skeleton of a spine.
“People first need to learn how to connect with their hands,” Frank says. He talks about how the hands possess their own intelligence and how he trains them. For years, he worked on creating a stone sphere, just to teach his hands what a sphere actually is—after all, it’s not something your head can truly grasp. “They don’t teach that at the art academies anymore,” he continues. “I recently had to mentor a student there because they don’t even have sculpture teachers anymore; all they learn there is how to talk nonsense and mess around on computers.” Frank isn’t afraid of criticism or anger—one might say, as befits an artist. “But there are bright spots, too.” He mentions he bought a new car, a Mazda. “At Mazda, sculptors create the car at full scale; then, people come in to see how the light interacts with it throughout the different seasons. Only then do the technicians take over. Well, you can see it, too—you’ll have to take a look in the parking lot later.” We begin to talk about the life of an artist today and the challenges it brings. How to remain autonomous yet connected? The ivory tower comes at a price. Yet, the institutions force you toward superficiality and ideology. "In Amsterdam, all art is Woke Woke“...but that has nothing to do with art anymore; it’s a race for the ultimate victimhood.” He spends more time in Amsterdam these days, having married an Amsterdammer six months ago. She is a violinist in the Concertgebouw Orchestra. “It’s elite sport; the great thing is that I can attend all those concerts now and even join her for performances abroad, like in Berlin recently.” His wife, like himself, is of German origin; they speak “Wiederdeutsch” together, he jokes. They’ve even started a little dictionary of their own words. Frank has lived in the Netherlands for a long time; he is ‘actually’ a pianist, but worked extensively in psychiatry. One day, he decided to become a full-blooded artist. The day before his unemployment benefits were set to expire, he registered as self-employed. It was a struggle. “In a way, I miss that; it gave you drive...” drive“…it gave you a sense of urgency; you had to keep working, otherwise there’d be no bread on the table.” Throughout our conversation, a joke is cracked here and there with a student, or a question is answered. “Teaching provides a nice connection to society; it’s useful. Otherwise, you’re only preoccupied with yourself, and that eventually runs its course. Besides, I once did twelve exhibitions in a single year without a single sale. On top of that, you end up paying for those pathetic little flyers and the dry biscuits they serve with the coffee. I’m done with that, and with those open-studio routes and all the rest. Most of the artists there are just 'ladies of leisure' managing things with their husband's credit card. People there only know two words: ‘lovely’ or ‘interesting’—the latter for when they don't like it at all. You’re not supposed to ask deeper questions about the work; there’s nothing behind it.” These days, Frank prefers to sell through the contacts he has built up over the years.
“The world essentially consists of images and stories; the rest is unimportant,” Frank explains. “Someone once asked Einstein what they should do to make their child smart. ‘Read them many fairy tales,’ Einstein said. But what if you want the child to be even smarter? ‘Read them even more fairy tales,’ the physicist replied.”
We talk about the relationship between the artist and the audience. “You want to show people what darkness and light are—the boundary between material and translucency.” “You can only breathe soul into a work through your hands. It’s that process of animation, of giving something a soul, that you want the audience to be able to feel. That is a process the head cannot perform; it can only be done with the hands.” This puts his criticism of the sculptor-less art academies into a very clear perspective.
Frank leaves me with the thought that, in reality, the artist doesn't change all that much—at most, it is the art that changes. A hundred years ago, Brancusi and Giacometti wouldn't have thought very differently about it.
Back at the car, I look at the Mazda through different eyes.
www.franklinsewski.nl