A young Jan Sirks is drawing during class. He is fascinated with the play of light on the face of his history teacher. He knows he will be punished for drawing in class but he does not care. He simply has to draw. Pencils and brushes are a natural extension of the stubborn and highly artistic Rotterdammer.Convention forces him to become an administrator with the Dutch Iron Railway Company but he continues his artistic development. A coal-infused snow landscape leads him to Rembrandt's chiaroscuro and a fascination with etching. His life is transformed when he takes a studio to house his etching press and engages a model. The vivacious pianist Hillegonda, first model, then muse, opens the door to his artistic success. At a jury-free exhibition in Amsterdam, he sees Henri Le Fauconnier's figurative abstract paintings and becomes obsessed with artistic truth. A mind-expanding meditation results in haunting visions and he adds abstraction to his oeuvre of realist industrial etchings of Rotterdam. After buying Blavatsky's Secret Science, he falls into the Theosophy-cushioned world of modern Dutch art and meets many seemingly kindred spirits. With juries, galleries and museums in Rotterdam refusing to exhibit modern art, Jan and his new friends establish the avant-garde art movement De Branding in 1917. With their penciled manifesto, they battle for their right to exhibit in Rotterdam. When dogma disguised as messianic truth sneaks in, Jan has to fight a far more personal battle and decipher what it means to be a modern artist.
About the Author: Yosay Briels is a new author to enter the historical novel genre. Her writing is inspired by true stories about artists and their art. She wants to bring the time of the artist to life so her readers can feel a part of it. Her debut novel The Dutch Artist and His Muse is based on the Rotterdam artist Jan Sirks and his muse Hillegonda. Yosay has a BA in Art History and French Literature and is fascinated with the context of art. In order to learn about her characters, she learns as much as she can to be able to re-create their lives. She visits their cities, listens to their music, reads their books and the plays they may have seen, studies their fashion and mannerisms, their foods, their homes and places of work, their hygiene habits, their perfumes, their foods and drinks, the structure of their day, their social life, their politics, reads their newspapers, their books, their exhibition reviews and pours over their letters and diaries. She was a founding member of the charitable trust that created and published the successful Harbour Kitchens cookbook. Her sketch "Insight, Hindsight and Foresight" was performed at the opening of the Christchurch Innovation Incubator. When she is not researching or writing, Yosay is a portfolio manager and curator for the Jan Sirks Collection. She is working on her second novel. It is about an artist.