My name is db Waterman, Mixed Media / Collage artist and photographer from the Netherlands.
I like to use magazine paper and the paper from old books for my collage work. I also work with many different materials such as acrylic paint, watercolor, oil pastels and pencil. My brushes are usually old and very worn because I work very roughly with them. In addition, my Stanley knife is a popular tool.I also collect all kinds of materials that I can use as stamps on top of the work.Kids inspire me. Their ability to transcend any given rotten situation is astounding. Playing tag in the ruins of a bombed Syrian city. Playing football in the most miserable neighborhoods. They are always looking for the light. They will save the future that our generations have really messed up, not even blaming us for it. If we only could keep the kid in ourselves a bit more, we wouldn’t be in such a mess. Art can help us to re-find our childlike innocence.
This is how I work. I use original photographs, all kinds of papers, acrylics, oil pastels, ink crayon and pencil in my artworks. The variety of resources I am now able to use has proven to be indispensable to me. I wanted my works to be transparent, gaining depth. That was the biggest challenge that collage art posed to me, its unforgiving lack of transparency. To find a way to replicate the effects of transparency that paint, especially watercolor paint, can bring. Finding that was my true achievement, I guess. In my paintings and collages I am trying to show the total of my creative work in it. Layer upon layer of different materials and all sorts of techniques, all leaving visible traces in the finished pieces.
A special project I did was making ‘The Swings’. For this I made a collage work on paper for every day of the week, with the image of a child on a swing. Each work was also named after a day, such as ‘Saturday Swing’ and ‘Sunday Swing’, etc. Each with its own corresponding color. I also made the original collages on paper on large canvases, because the series was very popular. One of the last available canvases in this series now hangs in the Muriël Guipin gallery, in Soho, New York.
