“With my work I want to bring peace of mind.”
Anita Fleerackers’ paintings are abstract, driven by colour
“We live in a hectic world, with often negative elements. With my art, I want to create peace, so that when people come home, they find a resting point in my work, which they can fully enjoy. That a work of mine is allowed to be part of people’s intimate living environment, I feel very honoured by that.” Ambassadors went to visit artist Anita Fleerackers from Gierle near Lille, and found a passionate personality, someone who is very content to be able to do what she has always wanted to do so much since childhood: create.
Anita Fleerackers volgde een opleiding aan de Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerpen en is ondertussen al meer dan 25 jaar beroepskunstenaar. Her work has not gone unnoticed in recent years. She won first prize Davidsfonds Lichtaart in 1992 and received the VRIKA Prize from the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. In 1998, the artist was awarded the Prix Libr’Art Libramont and she was a finalist of the XIX Concour Nacional De Ceramica l’alcara (Spain) in 1999. In 2009, she was a finalist of the Florence Biennale. The artist can provide an impressive list of exhibitions at home and abroad in which she has participated, and she has also exhibited in numerous domestic and foreign art galleries. Her oeuvre found its way into numerous private collections around the world.
Anita Fleerackers: “In my sculptures, I mainly try to depict movement. I am inspired by what I see in nature and around me: the movements of a dancing couple to the rhythm of a tango or a flamenco, a bull gathering all his strength in his neck muscles, ready to attack, a fierce horse galloping in the meadow,…”
Anita Fleerackers depicts these movements in stylised, minimalist images, taking the dancing couple, the ferocious bull, the galloping horse,… to their essence and captures their movement in just a few lines. However, the sculptures remain figurative. They are created in clay a then fired and glazed or cast in bronze.
Pixelism
Anita Fleerackers also creates paintings. Using oil paint (and with angelic patience), she applies tiny squares layer upon layer on heavy linen, manual pixels as the artist calls these squares, just as a digital photograph is also made up of thousands of pixels.
Anita Fleerackers: “Each time a feat, but when I see my painting, I am satisfied. That’s how I am, stubborn, but correct. I don’t sit on my lazy bum.”
Anita Fleerackers: “Mixing colours, layer upon layer upon layer, enjoying the countless variations on red and green and yellow and blue, with a little white added. Creating light and depth, dreaming and marvelling, being allowed to be there, being happy, but also persevering and not being distracted. What more does a person need?”
That Anita Fleerackers is where she is today is due to her hard and persistent work. She had a lot at stake to realise her dream. She built her first baking oven herself.
Anita Fleerackers: “I come from a large family and when the baker in the village quit, my father took over the wood oven to rebuild it at home to bake our own bread for our family. However, it never came to pass. When my father fell ill, I was given the bricks. I did not build a bread oven with them, but I did build a ceramics oven, thanks to my teachers’ thesis describing how to build such an oven. It was a kiln that was very labour intensive and you had to stay with it while firing. It was at the back of the garden and whenever I would bake a picture, barbecue was on the menu for the children, so I could keep feeding the oven with wood at the same time. You bet my son and daughter thought this was a treat every time.” (NV)
Ambassadors – volume 9 – number 16 – July 2015 Ambassadors.be
