Kamay 22A, Aruba north

Frits Heimans

Artist

About Frits Heimans

Frits Heimans is a visual artist, psychologist and saxophonist.

His abstract, expressionist paintings have always had a connection with the music (jazz), psychology, human relations, psycho-analysis, whether in the urban environment, which so characterizes the industrial, linear,, and with plenty of water.

He performs a lot with his famous Art Beat Saxophone Quartet, 4 saxophonists who write their own repertoire.

Frits Heimans is a teacher at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

Frits Heimans has been researching his own forms of expression since a young age.

Personal predisposition and stimulating factors in his social environment played an important role. Although forms of visual work had an early interest, making music became his first well-developed form of his own expression. However, he obtained his first professional qualification in psychology. But after that the way was clear to finish a saxophone study at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. For more than 2 decades Frits has worked full-time as a performing musician.

Neither during school and study, nor during the years of his career as a performing musician, has his visual development stood still. On the contrary, interest in visual art and architecture has always occupied an important place with Frits, and has always meant more to him than mere quantities to be consumed. The craftsmanship of improvisation and composition music gradually turns out to be applicable in many ways to the visual disciplines. In addition, observations and analyses of human behaviour provide the psychologically trained spectator with rich source material for his own ideas and for his own images. Drawing and painting, in principle without too much focused ambition, gradually developed into important possibilities of expression.

In this process, Frits came to the insight that visual works can ultimately bring him the closest to his personal ideal of artistic freedom.

Freedom that does not conflict with the inhibiting lead of an overdose of skilled knowledge and years of routine in certain fields, as he himself puts it.

Be able to fully give in to intuitive expression.

Let the interaction take place between the different disciplines you master. That’s the ideal.

At one point, therefore, Frits chose to establish a literally shared professional practice as a visual artist and as a musician.

In his painting, different greats come together in a fascinating symbiosis: abstraction, structure and composition in relation to music, psychology as an eternal quest for the essence of life, architecture as a spatial measure of how you stand in life, intuition and spontaneity as guides to the process of creation.

Frits prefers to paint with oil paint but also makes a lot of use of acrylic. A rich and varied colour palette characterizes his work. In his own experience, with increasing age, more sobriety appears in this Palette.

Abstraction can be regarded as the overarching means of style, although figurative and architectural elements also regularly occupy a place on his canvases. Drawing is always an important part of the visual work, both as a study and sketch phase as well as as an integrated image element in painting.