Jan Oosterman jr. (1911-1996)

Jan OOSTERMAN Jr. (Blaricum 1911 - Maarssen 1996)

Jan Oosterman worked in Maarssen as a ceramist and painter until his death. He was founder of the Keramisch Werkcentrum Foundation and co-founder of the Dutch Department of Ceramics.

The total oeuvre of Jan Oosterman shows a great variety of ceramic expressions. His urge to experiment propelled him forward and again and again resulted in new forms and the use of new (glaze) techniques and materials.

He therefore occupies a special place in the history of Dutch ceramics, especially because he has always kept an unmistakable signature in the enormous variety. The constant in his work is his poetic streak in relation to his sense of the picturesque. This manifests itself clearly in the early 1970s, when he transitions from the three-dimensional to the flat. At that time he made large wavy plates, which arise naturally from the independence of the decorations on the turned pots. He paints these plates with a variety of scenes, usually about people who have a relationship, often with unexpected elements such as chairs, helicopters, bicycles and insects. The direct influence that poetry, in particular the poems of Bert Schierbeek, had on his work is reflected in ceramic booklets. Books in which, in addition to texts by Schierbeek, he also writes his own texts on the clay, ideas that take the reader along in his soul life. In the early eighties new work is created. tube figures and visages; thin coiled plates and oval discs with subtle markings of the face and body. This is followed by a period of painted extremely thin sheets of porcelain and stoneware, inspired by the book Montaillou.

After his return from France, where he lived with his wife Anne Weitjens from 1976 to 1987, he occupied himself with the motif of nature, trees and animals and the everyday things around him. He captured these in a loose, sketchy and sometimes almost naive way. He painted scenes that seem to indicate the beginning of time, often with a figure standing in the corner looking at the scene. Man and his inner life is a recurring theme in the work of Jan Oosterman; concepts such as loneliness, death and aloofness preoccupied him; he depicted them in a very sensitive and intense way.

From 1992 onwards, the ceramics process started to become too heavy for Jan Oosterman. Gradually he switches from painting on ceramic supports to painting on paper, board and linen.

Various museums have included works by Jan Oosterman in their collection, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Central Museum, Utrecht; Municipal Museum Het Princessehof, Leeuwarden, The Hague Municipal Museum and the Hetjens Museum in Düsseldorf.

Source: Patricia Poelmann 1995/ Robert Witkamp 2000