By Tom Geddie
Bart Soutendijk saw the writing on the wall. And the pictures, too. The former technical writer retired from the fiber optics industry and moved from Fort Worth to Quitman about 25 years ago with his wife, Liz, to pursue art full time.
Writing — and pictures — on the wall still commands much of his time. He calls it wire wall sculpture. The concept is simple and dramatic to see, perhaps a bit more difficult to describe. The Netherlands native twists wire into images that hang on the walls of hotels, restaurants, convention centers, and other public centers and in galleries and at festivals throughout the United States.
“I’ve always wanted to do art, always made drawings,” he said. “It relaxes me, put me in another mindset. The work I did for Corning Glassworks, they liked because I illustrated the writing with photos and drawings, which made it easier to translate into other languages.”
An Alexander Calder exhibit in New York in 1972 influenced Soutendijk.
“I decided that was a good medium for the drawings I’ve been making all these years,” he said. Calder was famous for his mobile sculptures, but it was his earlier wire sculptures of celebrities and other subjects that impressed Soutendijk.
“I figured the drawing, which is restricted to a piece of paper, can be made very large and made a lot more exciting if it’s done with wire.”
Some of his pieces are as small as 8-10 inches high and two feet wide; others are a hundred feet wide.
Soutendijk’s wire sculptures exemplify the Claude Levi Strauss comment that all art is essentially reduction, and the Charles Simic comment that the challenge in most art is trying to say more with less.
He used to do stained glass, which amounted to putting shapes together. Then he got more interested in the lines between the shapes.
“I essentially start with a drawing, a sketch of whatever I kinda feel, then remove as many lines as possible without disturbing the feel of the image,” Soutendijk said. “I used to do that with a drafting pen and razor blade and redrawing, but the Adobe software packages changed my world, made it a lot easier.”
Sometimes Soutendijk t works from photographs.
“I’ll take a photo of somebody at a carnival or someplace. I’ll look at it, at a specific line in the photo that attracted me to take the photo in the first place,” he said.
“Sometimes that’s all I end up drawing out of it. It’s not calculated. I’ve learned to look at things and see their shapes. I figure that’s pretty much what our evolutionary ancestors learned very quickly – to identify the shape of a predator without even thinking about it, so they could jump out of the way.”
The resulting wire sculptures are essentially large line drawings in space. Soutendijk normally installs the wire about an inch off of a wall so that shadows constantly change depending on the lighting and the time of day.
“The final installation, a solid line in front of a moving shadow, has scale enough to suit a large space without dominating the room,” he said. “Since it’s not on a large piece of canvas or in a frame, it sorta becomes part of the wall. The shadow gives it depth.”
Bart uses 3/32nd or 12-gauge, powder-coated bailing wire for most of his work.
“Nothing is permanent, as long as you have pliers,” he said. “I build these things, then I hang them on the wall of my workshop when they are welded together. I sit back and look at them, and very often something’s just not right. So I cut away lines or take pliers and bend them, change things. When I have shows, I’m tempted but almost never go up and take pliers (to a piece) while people are looking at it.”
In 2020, Soutendijk started to spend more of his time selling online from his website along with two other art sites — Saatchi Art.com and Art Finder.com — and with art consultants.
“If you explore my website you will find that I create custom sculptures for residential, commercial, and public spaces. Even though I may limit my travel and don’t enter shows or approach galleries anymore, I’ve expanded my art to include mixed media sculptures, plus some very large pieces. The larger sculptures are made in several pieces that hang on the wall together. This way, they can be shipped in smaller boxes. Most recently, I have also been working on a collaborative effort with my wife on a picture book that is inspired by many wire wall sculptures of children. It is called We Played Outside. This book will wake up the readers’ childhood memories of playing outside and the listeners will sense the fun, the playfulness and enjoy how the poems and illustrations stir their imaginations.”
Soutendijk aims for simplicity and lives by the Maya Angelou phrase that “people may forget what you said or did but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
“It’s the simpler things in life that we find we cherish when our world looks like it is coming apart,” he says. “Suddenly, holding someone’s hand takes on a new meaning, taking a bath, watching people at work and kids at play, just having fun and laughing or remembering the simpler things we enjoyed in our youth now becomes our joy.”
Explore more about the works of Bart Soutendijk on WireWallArt.com.
Excerpts of this article came from the County Line archives/April 2008.