'Here come the puffins'

The painter Jasper Oostland from Groningen is known for his frogs and other animals in humanlike situations that he places on his canvas. With this type of work he's been very successful in the past ten years. 'Time for something else,' he thought, because anyone who visits the exhibition in the Public Library Groningen will see next to his familiar style something completely different: puffins. These paintings are based on the puffin (these seabirds with large beak are found in the northern Atlantic Ocean), but the birds are painted more graphically.

Jasper has reduced the creature to a few curved lines. The puffins cheerful colored bodies sometimes have bizarre structures and stripes. The cocky birds are jumping, diving, and walking around on the paintings. The humour radiates from the canvas!

Jasper: "Personally, I find it very funny that the birds have no wings, which is also a tragedy. It must be done very precisely where I paint an eye for example, by moving it just a few millimetres the expression of the bird becomes totally different. These paintings look simple, but there's a lot of sketching and erasing beforehand. In these paintings I am working just as precisely as in my other work, that's just how I like to work. The only difference is that I don't have to do smooth color transitions in shadows and dust expressions and stuff. That is great for now."