Jeroen Kees Blankert

Jeroen Blankert (1966) grew up among turpentine, donkeys, and palettes.

Father Barend Blankert and mother Koos van Keulen are important Dutch figurative painters.

Actually, almost everyone in the Blankert family dedicated their life to art, if not as a painter,

then at least as a graphic artist or as an art historian. Not for nothing does painter H. W. Mesdag

appear somewhere in the same family tree.

It could not be otherwise; Jeroen, the youngest branch of the tree, would also do something artistic.

But Jeroen did not do that. Jeroen wanted to become a drummer. He left for Amsterdam to study

at the Sweelinck Conservatory. But blood runs where it cannot go, and talent

cannot be denied – even before he had completed his studies, he was already painting.

And so he entered adult life with a drumstick in one hand and a brush in the other.

As a free spirit blessed with an enormous drive and a dislike for regulated working

existence, he got involved in various adventures. He painted sets, drummed for Ellen ten

Damme, Joop van den Ende, and Bettie Serveert, has been running the unparalleled

Amsterdam cultural palace De nieuwe Anita for quite some time, and temporarily ran his own gallery, Foie gras.

All this time, painting remained the only constant. An innate talent, painting vigorously, and a

great respect for craftsmanship and technique; after more than twenty years, this has resulted in an impressive figurative oeuvre.

Intensely colored landscapes, portraits, nudes, and everyday objects, vividly realistic with

every now and then a cartoonish edge, his work is as varied as his life path.

It remains a mystery what Jeroen Blankert ultimately became. Drummer? Painter? Pub owner?

Gallery owner? Cultural pope? There is only one thing certain. Jeroen Blankert is – as befits a true

Blankert – interested in the image. In the pictorial result of his craftsmanship.

Not in the stories behind it. Stories, he has enough of his own.