Maryse Ceha

Maryse Ceha’s work arises out of and in the making. Maryse’s work revolves around the pleasure of making, the wealth of possibilities inherent in the materials she uses and the power of the visual stories that reveal themselves to Maryse in the process of making. She is able to mine an abundantly rich source of possibilities, meaning and pictorial alternatives, while surfing on that wave of creative energy. Her work expresses the joy of making discoveries in the making process. By emerging herself in making art she discovers and translates a wealth of content.
Nevertheless, her work is the result of a total commitment to visualizing and thereby researching her world. Something does precede that making and that gathering of materials to make with. Maryse has been observing her world since childhood. She draws the landscapes she travels through, records her surroundings in small drawings in sketchbooks. They are not studies that she makes with preconceived intention, but the drawings do provide guidance in the creation of her work. They are present in the background as a memory in the newly created painting or even really present in an assemblage of images, each of which can in turn give rise to a new image. And it is also in the materials she collects without a preconceived plan. Sand, paint, stones, water.
Furthermore, there is a constant in everything she makes. Maryse has a fascination with water. For the beauty of the sea, for the light that slides in and over the water, for the reflections as the water reflects the light back and the silence when you are underwater. Water that gives life, that distorts coastlines, that always precedes the horizon. She describes this as follows:

“As human beings we primarily inhabit the land. the water is an unknown world and I think that attracts me, the mystery and the speculations about what lies beneath the surface.

The ocean, the water, is my calming place. I find comfort in the rhythm of the waves. seeing its vastness as our eyes scan the horizon. trying to comprehend its endlessness and feeling so small in the middle of its mighty endlessness.

In the deep, sound dissolves into silence, leaving only the whispers of my own thoughts. I see the deep blue spreading all around me. this is the realms of sublime nothingness, where the boundaries between reality and dreams blur.

There is something about getting so far from the world we know, without the distraction. My mind is free.”

Maryse does not make illustrations. Her work isn’t a pictorial rendering of what she has seen. She is looking for abstract values. In this regard, she is aligned with the traditions of artists such as Yves Klein and Mark Rothko who introduced color as subjects in their own right and with the colorfield painters who explored the power of color fields as new pictorial spaces. Maryse also succeeds in her work in conveying feelings of stillness, of awe at the mystery of the universal.

Now her artistic research includes other aspects of dealing with water. The pollution of water also gives rise to new images for her. Shocked by learning that water in the Netherlands is considered to be amongst the most polluted public accessible waters in Europe, she started gathering water from the canals in Amsterdam. Water from the Amstel River or water from the Prinsengracht have a different color as a result of pollution and the way organic processes are activated as a result. She collects that water and incorporates it into paintings where she creates new paintings inspired by the color and substance in the water. Like Herman de Vries with his “Earth Rubbings,” Maryse collects the colors of water. Colors that are derived from pollution. Beauty that comes from decay.