3 minute read
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
BROTHER VINCENZO, VERSATILE ARTIST
In the past and today, there are quite some brothers with creative skills. They make paintings, drawings, sculptures, or beautiful craftwork. It gives a different, sometimes unknown insight into the makers. This feature places a selection from this work in the spotlight. In part 13 of this series, we return to the versatile work of Brother Vincenzo de Kok and follow the wanderings of one of his drawings.
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Tableau with mountains and woods, no date. Oil on canvas. Evening town, 1967. Etching/sugar aquatint.
Brother Vincenzo (Jac) de Kok (1911-1997) was a versatile and gifted artist who enjoyed music, drawing and painting. His artistic works were distributed throughout the country and abroad. He mastered many techniques, and the subjects of his work were also multi-faceted. Brother Vincenzo was a lover of nature. He enjoyed being outdoors and often went out with his drawing materials and field easel. He lovingly captured the beauty of nature in his work, but he also created cityscapes, portraits, still-lifes, and abstract work.
Winter landscape with boat, 1985. Oil on panel.
Onesimus, 1996. Oil on panel.
Werststeeg Berlicum, 1981. Watercolour.
Garden, 1985. Watercolour. Veermankade in Hoorn, 1983. Drawing.
Beets, 1983. Watercolour.
Portrait, 1993. Oil on panel.
Empel, 1950.
The wanderlust of a drawing
Anton van der Lee is the happy owner of one of the many drawings by Brother Vincenzo. He tells how this drawing travelled a remarkable path. It started like this: in 2006 Anton assisted his good friend Nico to develop a commemorative card for Nico’s lonely neighbour...
As a thank-you I was allowed to pick a drawing from Nico’s stack of ‘works by Vincenzo de Kok’. I chose a pencil drawing in colour, made in Empel, April 1950.
The first thing I wanted to know, of course, was how my friend had come to possess all those drawings. I was told a bizarre story. He had bought them at an open-air second-hand book market in Tilburg, where late at night a young man, completely stoned, was selling them for 50 cents each!
My next question was: what exactly does it represent? Was it drawn to life, that little farmhouse, apparently half shot away in World War II and provisionally fixed? I placed the drawing in the free local newspaper ‘De Bossche Omroep’ with the question if anyone knew more about it. There were four responses. It turned out to be the house of a man named Marinus van der Dussen, nicknamed Marinus de Kuut, and it stood on a mound near the connecting road between the city of Den Bosch and some villages. It was demolished because of a viaduct construction.
And then there was a phone call from a frustrated relative of Vincenzo, who asked me how on earth this junkie had been able to get his hands on so many works, when after his uncle’s death he had not been able to buy even one piece as a memento. I could not give him an answer.
The drawing of Empel is now a precious possession for me, kept in a large folder, tied up with little bows, together with other art and old maps. God knows where it will go after I’m gone. Would Brother Vincenzo’s nephew still be alive? If so, he would be the first to be considered for it.
