Arjan de Weger
Paintings: an ode to the female sex. Paintings: Tribute to victims of political violence.
Almere, Netherlands

Arjan de Weger

Perhaps the most unknown known painter in this decade.

He started to paint 10 years ago helping my 12 year old brother.

After 3 years he developed his own style: First Black and white in oil.

Later with a touch of red.

I am his son and I saw our house transforming to an art house.

Nowadays on the internet, he is one of the highest ranked living painters of the world

On Google, using general keywords as ‘figure paintings’ or ‘sex paintings’, he is already for

several years in the top 3 even often number one. And that is something, considering the fact that that is the top of  close to 10 millions of results! And it gets even better on Google he can be found on the keyword ‘paintings’. This general keyword produces two hundred thirty million results. His 17 dollars a month site, http://arjan-paintings.artspan.com , shows up in the first 50 between names as Vermeer, Michelangelo, van Gogh. etc.

But Arjan isn’t really a painter at all. He is a Dental technician with his own lab. That is where he makes his living. Painting is just a hobby. I think he produces only 10 paintings a year, at most.

What makes his paintings even more unique, is that he’s not keen on selling. He says he knows what he’s doing and when we have too much paintings he burns or shreds a few. It’s better to burn it then to sell it for a few hundred bucks is his motto. But off course that’s easy to say if you have a good living. In this way he upgrades his site in quality with every painting that matches to his standard.

How the people respond to our online gallery at Artspan? Last year we had over a half million views on single paintings, but that is only our site. His paintings are yet to be seen at so many sites. There even are poems written about his paintings. Most in Italian (I have no idea what it says)

He pays very much attention to ensure that what he paints is correct. His eye for detail is the connection between painting and his work as a dental technician. For example, he wanted to paint The crucifixion of Christ because as he said it was never painted correctly and it was a political victim with a lot of impact. He needed to paint it. I think it took him 4 years from the first time I heard him talking about it and the finishing. Talking, reading and sketching.

One day I came home finding out he made a kind of cross on the garden fence, because he needed to know what it was like, hanging on a cross. So midwinter my father was hanging at the fence and I had to shoot some photos. These photos are the basis of his crucifixion painting. It took him another year to get the writing that is on top of the cross.

Joey Davison