Jansen, Han

n 1980 Han Jansen painted the Wadden Sea. Not in the way that hundreds of others before and after him did, but literally: by sprinkling paint pigments into the gullies and trenches. The mudflat bottom and the gullies, in which the water slowly flowed, colored brillant-green, crimson-red and lemon. For a moment Han stood beside God to show that on the umpteenth billionth day of creation things could be even more colorful," said then director Wouter Kotte of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Utrecht. Han Jansen gained international fame with his mudflat paintings. The son of a Groninger gentleman farmer knew how to innovate. For fifteen years his paintings adorned the covers of the quirky northern magazine Noorderbreedte; a special stage for an artist. He painted land, both in the interior of Australia and behind his house in Eelderwolde. He was also the spiritual father of so-called "stream paintings. Jansen poured the paint onto flat linen and then let gravity and the structure of the canvas do the work, if he tilted the surface. Even a staircase once formed the surface for such a flow painting. Henk van Os argues that Jansen had an unprecedented ability to renew himself. He took nothing for granted; he was a creator in the true sense of the word.