Music, through subtle vibrations on a cosmic level is an expression of our metaphysical aspirations and so it is with the exquisitely refined and elegant, allegorically precise drawings of Juul Kraijer. The content of her figurative artwork is teeming with symbols and archetypes she claims come spontaneously from her subconscious. And though I asked whether she was acquainted with certain literati personages to which she answered in the negative I cannot help but think of Kahlil Gibran’s spiritual drawings or Carl Jung’s Man and his Symbols or Gottfried Helnwein drawings. Gazing at her artwork my aural memory brings back a purely and utterly fulfilling experience of listening to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring or Petroushka or Scriabin or Prokofieff. Her delicately drawn figures are surprisingly unadulterated spiritually though tattooed with the most extraordinary body markings in chaste visual harmony, like music is an expression of metaphysical aspirations on a cosmic level, composed of subtle visual wavelengths. Her images trigger floods of deep-seated psychological responses from a soft but somewhat wounded perspective depicting the conflicts of the Anima-Animus. Addressing Ms. Kraijer on that subject, she responds,
“I hardly ever consciously use existing iconography in my work, though you are free to see if it matches somewhere - I'm curious about that too. The images I draw come to me fully instinctively - but unconsciously I might be plugging in to an archetypical image bank.”
Prodding her further, she volunteers that in regards to any significant reading,
“The book that influenced me most in recent years is Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception and even more the essay he wrote a year later about art and its qualities of transporting.”
Such intellectual transports seem to imbue Juul Kraijer work without the help of mind-expanding drugs. She, like so many artists, enters that meditative zone by immersing herself in precise pencil strokes. I venture to relate some of her work to a visual Carlos Castaneda from a feminine perspective. She takes mental flights of fancy with human features adorned with the genesis of the psychological human make-up. As Manly P. Hall says,
"Symbols are oracular forms–mysterious patterns creating vortices in the substances of the invisible world. They are centers of a mighty force, figures pregnant with an awful power, which, when properly fashioned, loose fiery whirlwinds upon the earth."
Juul Kraijer’s oeuvre is a testament to the search of Woman’s wholeness centering on the relationship between inner metaphysical aspirations and outer revelations through artistic projections. It is much like suffering or samsara but moksha, or liberation from samsara is the transcendental goal through which Juul Kraijer liberates her innermost feelings.
Her feminine figures are not unlike the myth of Daphne who transforms into a tree thus communicating with nature’s origins. I see in her a nymph closely aligned with nature with her art transcending ordinary representation. Hers is divine force incarnate.
Love tinka