NYAB Event - Piet van den Boog "I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest"

Piet van den Boog "I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest"

Mike Weiss Gallery

This event has ended.

Influenced by Dutch painters Frans Hals and Vermeer, van den Boog evokes an array of emotion in the spectator by allowing him/her to be present in a profoundly intimate setting.

In this new series of paintings, the artist illustrates the dichotomy that the human ability to make choices both affords us and denies us control over our lives. Heavily influenced by the writings of Sylvia Plath, the artist based these works on a passage from Plath’s 1963 novel in which a fig tree metaphorically describes the situation that we often find ourselves in when faced with difficult choices:

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
- Sylvia Plath (“The Bell Jar”, 1963)