A Journey to the Netherlands

Marcel thinks life is like nature playing a joke on us. According to him life is completely useless, it causes so many of us a lot of pain and to top it off it is really short. A scandal and a bad joke.

He starts at the top left and ends up on the bottom right. Standing in front of this story do you look at it from the top left to the bottom right? Or do your let you eye go over it in no particular order? Here in the Netherlands and throughout large parts of the world people are used to reading left to right. That’s why we are used to looking at things left to right. Even when looking at art. Try and look at it the other way around. Start on the right and work your way left? What happens when you do?

The drawings Marcel makes are about historical events. Everything he creates comes from a world Marcel does not know, because he wasn’t alive yet. All of Marcel’s work is made up out of images that already exist. Specifically images that existed before he did. Before 1965.

To get an idea of what the past looked like, Marcel uses old photos and magazines. They help him to understand what the world was like and what was going on.

Each of Marcel’s works are like a chapter in a larger never-ending story. This work is one of those chapters. Throughout the story the characters are reoccurring and the places change. The works are connected to events in Marcel’s own life. The story in the chapter before this one takes place in Malaga (Spain) and the one after ours takes place in New York (United States).

Our story starts with quotes from the dairy of Albrecht Dürer. It chronicles the artists travels to the Netherlands in 1520. Before he started his journey Dürer stayed in Aachen (Germany) where he was present for the crowning of Charles V. It is there that he meets fellow artist Mathias Grünewald. Before Dürer travels to the Netherlands they made a secret plan.

In the 14^th century there was a lot of unrest in Germany. A farmer revolt was about to break out. The catholic church had been taking advantage of the people. Martin Luther published his writing shortly before and they only made protests worse.

At the time Mathias Grünewald got a lot of assignments from the archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg. When Grünewald decides he wants to join the revolt he gets in trouble. Together with Dürer and astrologer Johannes de Indagine Grünewald makes a plan to get rid of the archbishop.

On one of his drawings Grünewald writes a recipe for a deadly poison. On the other side he draws a horoscope that Johannes de Indagine made to determine the best day to kill the archbishop.

But first Dürer has to travel to the Netherlands to get two ingredients for the poison. The first an organ from a whale. The second a herb. Dürer heard that there was a beached whale at Zierikzee. He goes there and finds the whale. To get the herb he travels here, to Lisse. The best quality of this herb can only be found at the Cookenduin. In Lisse he stays with the dune inspector, in his warm house. The man feeds Dürer and the next day they go looking for the herb. When Dürer gathered enough of the herb he goes back to Aachen.

Parts of this story are historically accurate, others are fiction. For instance, Dürer did go to Zierikzee to look for the whale, but it wasn’t there anymore. At least, that is what it says in his dairy. Dürer doesn’t write about a trip to Lisse, but that was supposed to be a secret of course. Or did Marcel make it up?