The landscape paired back to an austere simplicity, has inspired Dutch based painter Anke Roder’s practice with two rich seams to mine – seascapes and plants.
Her encaustic seascapes, sensuous satin slabs anchored along a welded horizon, ooze light. The ancient beeswax and pigment technique, applied in molten layers, conveys a contained elemental energy, loading the northern colours within a saturated interior. Rendering down sea and sky to a semi-abstract geometry, Roder’s work, anchored in observation, convinces, rewards and delights the patient eye. Seasons, light and weather are all here, distilled through a northern romantic sensibility into beautiful paintings, crafted from simple materials transformed.
Within the works, the atmosphere and interplay of light and space in a natural environment shows mountains and clouds, rising above deep waters. Some of the most varied and unusual colours can be found at the eastern sky, opposite the midnight sun. Colours of early light are mesmerizing in shifting hues and ocean light stretches languidly to all wind directions. The landscape is always in motion.
Roder lives and works on the coastal plains, near Groningen, in northern Holland and studied at the Academy of Arts in Maastricht and the Royal Academy of Art and Design, ’s- Hertogenbosch.