My Amsterdam studio

A visit to my Amsterdam studio

About forty years ago I walked into my Amsterdam studio and noticed a bullet hole in the window. I found the bullet and kept it - it had hit the opposite wall and fallen to the floor, totally squashed. I figured out the trajectory. Had I been standing at my work-table, it would have gone right through my head. The police merely shrugged when I told them. Ach, it's only a small bullet.

Things have quietened down a bit since then. Around 1979 the city had given ten artists the opportunity to rent a classroom in this recently closed lower school, still littered with abandoned tiny tables and chairs. There was one problem - the local "Hells Angels" motorcycle club had squatted the ground floor and were most aggrieved that we had "invaded" their space. Their threats to set the building alight, attempts to demolish our staircase to create more space for their motorbikes and their habit of playing deafening music didn't exactly encourage creativity. 

But the Burgemeester eventually closed down the Hells Angels club; it became a crèche, fronted by a lovely playground where little kids can scream their lungs out under my window - just what I need when studying a pianissimo passage in a new performance score. Across the street is a thriving "koffie-shop" (read softdrugs-café), where noisy motorbikes come and go continually, presumably as drugs couriers. 

Those early days when my studio was still fairly uncluttered, with some of my early sketches of the Netherlands Dance Theater on the wall.

An artist's creative space should be an inspirational and private place where miracles can happen, despite frustrating intrusions from without and within. It takes great determination to protect your spiritual space. My studio has many colourful memories, creative, romantic, disappointing and exciting. What a joy it is then to occasionally receive such support as this unforgettable loving message from Yehudi Menuhin that I received on arrival at the studio in 1991. How happy he would have been to see me recently, making plans in the studio with violinist Daniel Hope for performances together.

My studio is seven metres long, so that determined the length of my biggest painting ever, a mural in acrylic for the Netherlands Dance Theater, eight panels painted flat on the floor in 1987, stepping stones to leap across like a dancer, later to be cut and to hang free from the wall. 

I've welcomed many visitors, to choose a painting, for a workshop, or even to turn the place upside down, like the BBC film crew directed by the wonderful Jonathan Fulford, to make a documentary around my Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra, a 1993 performance with the CBSO and Sir Simon Rattle in Symphony Hall Birmingham. Oh man, we were all twenty-five years younger then! The renowned film-maker Dick Kuijs (second from right) has been in and out of the studio many times, making a new documentary of my life painting music, hopefully to be finished in 2018.   

An unexpected surprise was a recent visit by the pianists Rokas Zubovas and his wife Sonata Zubovienė. Rokas is the great-grandson of musician/painter M.K. Čiurlionis, so I just had to give them a few glimpses of my first experiments with live kinetic painting with The Sea by Čiurlionis, for performance with the CBSO in Birmingham in the 2018/19 season. He loved it.

With windows high up on the second floor, the studio has a good natural lightfall, ideal for studies of the nude model or for a portrait.

 

But I can also create absolute blackout for projections of live kinetic painting in rehearsal.

Tamara Hoekwater improvising in my flowing colours with "Bésame Mucho"

I'm grateful for my special space. It holds the vibes of wonderful memories, the throes of creativity and the joys of sharing some of the results, now spread worldwide in good homes or on internet at www.normanperryman.com

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