A few words about Bianca, the artist, the friend, the harbor where dreams begin.

Imagine a garden with delicate orchids. She stands amidst them, her hands poised in mid-air, so gracefully, eyelids downward, bare feet, poised in glittering garments, she
moves as the heart center of white petals, she moves but the stillness invades you and her down cast eyes tell you more of the secrets in a woman's heart than if she looked you in the face.
As a woman, it was when I first saw her dancing that I fell in love with her.

It seems a thousand years ago, it seems forever that we have known each other. Our daily lives mingled, but it was her art that so often fed my poetry, her battles to win mine. Like a butterfly she touches at every art form, creating it and from it, with a brush or hands molding plaster, with paint, charcoal, pencil, words, or silver threads….
And she finds you, spurs you on, gives you a single word from which a mountain of words can follow, and she listens to the silence between you, the magic moment when a new idea is born, the tragic mask lifted to appease the muse.

She is a pure artist at heart. Absorbing life experience, like the delicate brush dips into water to make the color flow, the title behind it is always "truth". And as truth involves pain and joy, success and failure, dreams and heart wrenching voids, she fills them, recreates them, performs them, takes us with her in the fascinating journey, a bottomless well of inspiration.
The door to her studio is wide open. She beckons for you to enter, to absorb, to find your own self in finding her.
She makes it happen…

Patrizia de Rachewiltz,
poet and translator 2005

introduction "Watertriptych, passionfruit cross an ocean"

poem "Down Absolute Azures" and object "Tropic tears"

colophon "Watertriptych"

cover "Watertriptych"

My name is Bianca Tangande, I have been working as a visual artist since 1979 in -'s-Hertogenbosch.

During the years I have acquired abundant experience as performer, designer, artist's initiator or instructor. Also through workshops of dance mask performance in groups of children, youths, grown-ups and elderly people.

This experience has taught me that a vast range of people is receptive and interested in different cultures.

Thanks to them my art work is exhibited or performed, wishing to establish a particular self while bringing it forth as a personal gift for a beloved one.
My art works consist in what I see as invulnerability and therefore typically my own,
ranging from:

· Drawings of faces in sketch form, where the moment of recognition creates the essential inner self of the person who meets me.
· Masks with external features of the person, the tangible frozen quality of the work process in relation to me.
· Watercolor landscapes, lyrical and abstract of my inner perceptions.
· Pictures of observations capturing a special light fall, color or form, an intimate moment of detail of my immediate surrounding.
· Hats, unique with sand portrait drawing.
· Paintings with own made pigment paint with a brush drawing

On commission I create many-sided and broad-oriented work: the work process by mutual agreement, sound and personal, the realization self-willed and stylish, from analogue to digital.

I am influenced in my work by my Indonesian/African descent, by the colors and forms of these cultures and lines as Matisse paints them.
My sources of inspiration are my daughters Lieve and Veerle, who continuously push me to a new life pattern, showing me the ever changing emotional sides of life.

Different forms are: drawings, pictures, watercolors, masks, paintings, hats and objects.

A quotation from my diary:
My studio is jammed with work, yet they want something else.
This something else is to set my own stamp on the final art work. I could interpret the assignment as a means of communication between the commissioner and me. Separate…
I am someone running to extremes or standing still.

Bianca Tangande, 2005

Workshop Dance Mask Creation

Are you interested in making contact within a group, with known or unknown participants, family, friends or colleagues to get to know them in a better way, then this group experience will be an inspiring way to get closer to each other.
After an introduction and showing examples about the origins of the mask, you start making your own dance mask of your face as a mould or of someone else sitting in front of you, with quieting Soendanese (West Java) music playing in the background.

Background information: As visual artist I have achieved a vast experience during the last 15 years at working as a team with children, young and older people. In the quiet and patient atmosphere, being together, laughing and in silence, getting into touch very closely, unveiling your face, come and participate to this workshop!
This workshop originated from my mother's dance, the dance of her memory, the Jaipongan, a social folk dance from the 50'ies.She taught me this dance with the selendang (an elongated wrap) which I then passed on to my children.
These dance masks of Indonesia inspired me to create a dance outgoing from the Jaipongan, in which the mask itself serves as an offering recipient. The making of the mask becomes a portrait of the moment, a tangible three dimensional picture.
Through this process the dance achieves its own character. I've worked on several occasions with artist Bianca Tangande, in the field of community art and by her invitation as a poet of an art project.

She has flair

Since we keep in touch as regards to each other's doings, I have known Bianca in many different aspects: as an artist of course, as an inspirer and motivator, as a spider in the web and as an advisor. Bianca is someone who can make something extraordinary from the smallest thing. She's a networker, draws people in and gets anyone enthusiastic who comes near her. The nice thing about Bianca is that she gladly likes to share a part of her stage with new, young and upcoming talents. Quite a few artists from inside and outside the Netherlands owe the most various art projects to her.

She has flair of spotting and bringing together different interests and moulding them in solid projects. Moreover Bianca is skilled in observing from a distance ostensibly conflicting motivations within a group, leaving them the space without intervening directly but just with her presence, advice and guidance. Both directly and indirectly she is a source of inspiration for anyone who is lucky to know her. Her sense of justice and compassion with those less fortunate in our society is an ever recurring aspect of her being.

Impresario Renk van
Oyen, Oude Muziek
Brabant
Friday June 12, 2009

To have followed her closely all these years

accompanying text by Mario in jubilee catalogue KEG (Cultural Events Group) 30 years partners in art.

We have known each other since 1973, as we were both in our first year at the Academy of Art and Design (currently St. Joost) in 's-Hertogenbosch.
Meanwhile, a few years later we became partners in art and in our daily life.

After the Academy, in 1979, we and a few other artists, built studios in the WillemII-factory in Den Bosch, where we are still working.
We also both are connected to the Graphical Workshop Den Bosch.

We have two daughters. Although we are meanwhile not a couple in daily lives anymore, we still have the feeling we remained partners in many ways: in art as well as in friendship we continued to follow and support each other.

So it is a great occasion to make an art work together from this support and to be able to show it.

Mario: "As long as I have known her, Bianca is in her life and art a tireless person, also continually curious of new paths and always ready to support unselfishly artists and other people in her immediate surroundings. I find it really admirable and special to have followed her closely all these years.
The artwork she shows in this exhibit seems to me as an artwork which was created with a relaxed and blissful feeling. As the freedom she shows us through the use of materials, it also shows a form (I see a flower, but also a corner of the cosmos?), which renders the blossoming in freedom, structure and self-assurance.( the title of this artwork is "Bunga", which in Indonesian means not only "flower" but also "evolution".)

The painting that I am showing, "Couple", has primarily originated as a 3Dcomputer drawing. At the beginning the drawing consisted of two true to nature human figures, but in a recalcitrant way I started to change sections of them, with enlargements, substituting etc. Finally two persons stood there, transformed, movingly, in an empty space, holding hands, but they had formed a character. It seemed to me a beautiful starting point for a large painting in oil colour."

Our joint work is a polymeric print of different colours in yellow, red, blue and black. Each layer originated as a direct reaction to the previous layer: Bianca started with a drawing/painting in yellow; Mario reacted to this with a drawing in red. Bianca followed up with blue and Mario finally finished with black.
This work's title is: "Beginning".

Mario Dijsselbloem
September 2010

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