P. Roberto Bakker

Artist Statement

I am a Venezuelan-Dutch painter living in the Netherlands. I paint still-life series of objects I encounter in my daily life. I work with water-mixable oil paint, oil paint, watercolor, pencil, and pastel.

My process is spontaneous and involves experiences of connection with people that I come into contact with in my daily life. In my painting, I portray the ingredients of human exchange, emotion, reflection, and meaning. Human connection is central to my work as a psychiatrist, the medical specialty where communication at different levels is an important tool of diagnostics, treatment, and recovery. As a psychiatrist, I am most interested in the unvoiced ingredients of connection, which we as humans express indirectly through our choices of particular objects and how we interact with those objects. Objects help us to express the unvoiceble, the most intimate details about us. With my paintings, I hope to discover more about what human connection and communication means.

I started a still-life series of roses after a colleague gave me roses as a thank you for our conversation earlier about a shared difficult experience. In these still-life-series paintings, I express our similar painful experience, which we cannot express to others. The series began with fresh roses and concluded after ten paintings with dry roses. My colleague and I see the drying of the roses as the process of dealing with our painful experience.

By creating still life series of everyday objects, I explore the role these objects play in our daily human communication and are a means of saying what is unspeakable, unvoiced, unutterable. Objects, even trivial, help us to utter the nice and ugly, the happy and painful. With my series I hope to be able to invite others to recognize and acknowledge other aspects of their communication and so find comfort and answers.

Bio

Although my life's practicalities led me to a professional career in medicine, science, and teaching, I have always been profoundly creative. Since 2018 I have been taking lessons in drawing and painting, and I became inspired in making oil paintings and drawings of semi-abstract paintings of daily objects symbolizing human connection and communication.

I earned my:
Medical Doctor in the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Master of Science in Genetic Epidemiology in the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (Nihes)/Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Bachelor's degree in Humanities Arabic Language and Culture in the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
PhD in the Department of psychiatry and psychology at Maastricht University, The Netherlands

I work as a psychiatrist in a mental inpatient clinic in Psychiatric Center Arkin and as a researcher at University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands., The Netherlands. I am a member of several national and international scientific societies.

This combination of activities has a synergetic effect, and I hope to pass this on to others. At this moment, I am preparing an exhibition.