Eline de Jonge

Eline de Jonge is an award winning artist living in Amsterdam and exhibiting in Europe and the United States. She lived in New York as a student, where her fascination and relationship with this city started. Later she moved there again for another eight years. She was caught up in the energy of the people and intrigued by the ever-changing neighborhoods. The effect of the bright and sunny days in any season of the year on the shadows and movement of the people and buildings adds more drama to that sensation.

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Eline de Jonge is an award winning artist living in Amsterdam and exhibiting in Europe and the United States. She lived in New York as a student, where her fascination and relationship with this city started. Later she moved there again for another eight years. She was caught up in the energy of the people and intrigued by the ever-changing neighborhoods. The effect of the bright and sunny days in any season of the year on the shadows and movement of the people and buildings adds more drama to that sensation.

Her fascination resulted in a series of paintings depicting scenes such as Grand Central Station, street scenes with moving taxicabs, the ice skaters in the Wolman rink in Central Park and many Cityscapes, mixing architecture and people in a dynamic way. The focal point of her work is from height and distance, showing dramatic shadows and is created with oil or mixed media on large canvases.

Her successful New York series led to numerous commissions from the United States and Europe and her work is in private and corporate collections as well as in public buildings like the Amsterdam Courthouse and the Four Seasons Hotels in the U.S.A.

De Jonge is looking for a balance between energy and contemplation, between movement and quietness. Although the paintings depict dynamic city scenes they often convey a remarkable sense of calmness. Since Eline has been living in the Netherlands her favorite European city, Paris, has been added to her portfolio.

In her latest pieces De Jonge uses different materials to experiment and enhance her message, like large wooden panels with epoxy finishes. She uses the New York Times in her mixed media work, as she feels this newspaper translates the powerful New York feeling. The newspaper in its current format will be disappearing from daily life and will become digital. This new series tells a story by the selected clippings from this newspaper, combined with the painted walking human figures and their shadows creating the "New York City Vibes".

Eline now works in an antique studio in the middle of nature in Blaricum (a Dutch arts colony), just outside Amsterdam. The studio was used by artists of "the Larense School". Piet Mondriaan also used to work there during the summers in the early 1900's. The studio is filled with history and generates an inspired environment.

Eline de Jonge works with an exclusive network of selected galleries in London, Barcelona, New York and the Netherlands and exhibited also at some prestigious art fairs as Art Miami, Scope Basel and PAN (Amsterdam). Her art education was attained at the School of Fine Arts in Utrecht (MFA) and Art History at Trinity College in Cambridge, U.K.

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"Unlike most representational artists of the current decade, Eline de Jonge does not begin her own creative voyages from a particular visual prerequisite.

Rather, she moves exactly in the opposite direction. Eline de Jonge begins with one clear-cut concept, that she may find visually stimulating, then, following her inquisitive nature, she seeks a way to express that concept through the vocabulary of her chosen medium.

For Eline de Jonge, painting is manifestly an act of visual poetry. But it is also an act of passionate involvement with a creative idea. The intriguing ambiguities of cast shadows, like in Giorgio de Chirico's work, or the energizing power of motion and speed, speak eloquently of a distinct fascination with her own era as well as pointing to a daringly creative personality."

Enzo Russo