“Study the science of art, study the art of science. Develop your senses - learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else……”
CONNECTIONS
We are increasingly finding that life is about ‘connections’. It never ceases to amaze us how so many random things and people are connected through our magical village which is Cotignac.
This became very apparent late last year when we were lucky enough to acquire a collection of drawings and preparatory sketches by the Dutch painter Wim Oepts.
Wim Oepts
Wim Oepts was born as the first child in a big art-loving family on 2 December 1904 in Amsterdam. His life as an artist resulted in many friendships with other artists like Charley Toorop, Pyke Koch and Kurt Schwitters.
Oepts left Amsterdam after a few years and eventually settled in Paris and the South of France with his new wife Marthe Caudal. Here he came under the influence of French painters like Matisse, Derain and Bonnard.
He maintained a studio near Cotignac and it was from here after his own and the death of his wife, that we were able to buy the sketches.
And now for the magical connections that Cotignac often offers up……
A Game of Bridge
Apart from Art one of our other loves is playing the card game of Bridge. Shortly after we acquired the drawings we were playing Bridge with some new Dutch friends of ours who had just bought a house in the village. As we always get excited about new acquisitions we told them all about our Oepts drawings.
Surprise, surprise, they had some friends who were lucky enough to have inherited a very fine Oepts painting, wouldn’t it be funny, we all thought if we had the original drawing for the painting? There is an extensive catalogue raisonné for the works of Oepts which we acquired.
Search and Discovery
Our bridge chums told us which painting their friends had in their collection - so the search was on! ………….And we found it!
So exciting to discover the original sketch for the painting in our group of drawings. Who would have thought?
To the excitement and delight of everybody, we have thus been able to reunite the two. Sketch and painting now live happily together, in Oepts’ native homeland.
Fascinating to see the start of Oepts’ creative process, sketching familiar scenes and how he then worked these up to his magnificent, colourful finished paintings.
AFFORDABLE ART
Egged on by our success we continued our ‘Art sleuthing’ to try and reunite more works. To our continuing surprise, we were able to attribute various of our sketches to the finished paintings in the catalogue raisonné.
We have started to put some of these online on our store at 1stdibs.com but also we have selected a few examples here (also see our ‘affordable art’ section) as a great opportunity to acquire really interesting pieces of original art by an accomplished master.
