Now in the fourteenth year of its existence Art on the net has become an institution on the Internet. I'm therefore particularly pleased and grateful to have become a part of it and instead of mirroring my website paintings.name, I have decided to live up to Art.net's Lile Elam's words:

Work in progress will therefore be this site's theme, with images of unfinished artworks, intended to give the visitor insight into the creative process of art.

The making of a work of art is a journey of discovery. In art a style isn't designed, it's discovered. With one idea leading to another, the artist is, in a sense, as much a spectator to the creation of his style, as the visitor that views his artworks. In general one can clearly discern the artist's examples and starting points in art, such as the styles of established artists. It is the process that leads him away from these starting points, however, that defines him as an artist.

The art displayed on this page are completed artworks, but the remainder of this website shall be concerned with the process that leads up to a finished artwork and shall therefore feature images of art in various stages of development.

Taking a photograph of a work of art such that it does the artwork justice, is more difficult and time-consuming than one may think. Therefore, by necessity, the images featured on the subsequent pages will be snapshots in which we shall not be concerned with photographic quality.

Please allow me to elaborate on this studio's one-line intro, as published on several of Art.net's webpages:

Exploring the 20th century's artistic revolution, from abstract portraiture to semi-abstract social realism and beyond.

If that isn't bombastic, I don't know what is, but there is a core of truth in it. Without doubt Pablo Picasso was the most influential artist of the 20th century and his semi-abstract female portraits have inspired this artist, as well as countless other artists. When you start to paint, you're not very concerned with a painting's content, in general; you're happy just to be able to produce works that are of a decent painterly quality, and taking the works of a successful predecessor as a starting point is an excellent way to begin. That one quickly strays from the path laid out by an old master is inevitable (and desirable) because no two people are alike, that is, think alike. Indeed, it soon became apparent that this artist is of the "composing-type", according to the Flemish/German/Russian tradition, by which I mean that the composition, that is, the way details are combined to contribute and be in harmony with the picture as a whole, is the central technical feature of the painting. This produces a directness which in the Southern European tradition is seen as "crude".
Technically there are as least as many differences between Picasso's work and methods as there are similarities. From the beginning however, I felt comfortable with his artistic vocabulary and in many ways my earlier paintings have Picasso's "gut-feeling", without being able to draw upon his Hispanic/Southern European cultural background with its poetic finesse.

If there is one thing that characterizes 20th century art its expression, which is likely to be due to one man: Vincent van Gogh. But it was Pablo Picasso who played a key-role in the 20th century's artistic revolution: .

There comes a time that one grows weary of painting pretty girls with pony-tails. Looking for more depth, content comes into the picture. But doesn't that conflict with the very definition of abstract art, according to which content is replaced by the pure visual experience? Well, although instrumental in the creation of abstract art, Pablo Picasso himself never became a pure abstract painter and today abstraction is not regarded as a must anymore, just a resource to draw upon.
Desiring to give my art more "depth" I have moved in the direction of the tradition of social realism (not to be confused with socialist realism...), giving rise to the apparent contradiction of "abstract realism". If I refer to "semi-abstract social realism", a term that seemed appropriate, I mean realism rather in the sense of content than of style or method. I'm referring to the tradition in which artists try to "paint it as it is", an unidealized view of society. My latest works draw upon the impressions imposed upon our contemporaries by the media and therefore a significant part of these works refer to the Middle-East. Please understand that social realism doesn't have to mean taking a political stance, it are impressions of human experience what my new works are about.

If an effort to reduce the above-mentioned directness, to which I'm no stranger, I have named the Woman and Mailman painting as such, but actually the painting is a portrait of an Asian prostitute and, indeed, a mailman, how they were related in real life, I have no idea.
its not that I take a neo-Western interest in "the margin of society", as a voyeur or disaster-tourist, but I do feel that people under pressure are, in a sense, closer to nature and perhaps to the human condition.

External links:
http://paintings.name: Marten Jansen's website.
http://martenjansen.mobi: Marten Jansen's mobile site (only viewable on mobile devices).