“Wow!” “Amazing!!” “Great workflow!!” Enthusiastic followers easily get addicted to watching Dutch artists FreelingWaters’ smooth painting skills displayed on their “How it’s done” Instagram feed. Indeed, it is a joy to watch FreelingWaters effortlessly wield their large spalter brushes. Pairing the abstract with the scenic, they create radiant color gradations, geometric patterns, ornaments, creatures, and inscriptions while playing visual games with the content or invisible parts of the furniture. But make no mistake: many hours of practice have gone into their mesmerizing virtuosity.
Gijs Frieling, a fine art painter who was looking for assignments, frames, and functionality, and Job Wouters, a calligrapher from a graphic design background who was searching for craft and more freedom, met in 2007 while working on Vernacular Painting (2009), an artist publication about Frieling’s murals. Wouters discovered that his calligraphic type designs happily coincided with Frieling’s approach to painting. The book led to a successful collaboration with Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten in 2012, which marked their first activity as a team.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, after painting an antique piece of furniture together, the duo felt a desire to explore painting cabinets in tandem. The walls of their new—now shared—studio space in Amsterdam functioned as a canvas for a first series of flat studies. Soon they were obsessed by the possibilities. “This is it!” they exclaimed after completing their first cabinet. “Each cabinet brings its own givens in terms of construction and ornamental program,” says Frieling. “As a canvas for painting, it offers us structure and a starting point.” Wouters explains: “We’re simply completely transforming existing cabinets from inside out, from top to bottom. Sometimes we follow the structure of how a cabinet is built; sometimes the painting design stands completely separate.”
The cabinets, mostly 19th-century (but sometimes older) antiques found by a trader in Germany and Eastern Europe, are completely stripped of previous coats of paint, then treated with lye. Frieling says that they look for pine cabinets, which is “a type of wood that needs protection from decay anyway and is suitable for painting.” Wouters explains that they make their own paint “using casein binder and pigments, which is thin, very liquid, and leads to amazingly sharp results.” Compared to other paints like acrylic, the colors are intense. Because the paint dries quickly and matte, FreelingWaters can add layer upon layer while working quickly—at “commercial speed,” Wouters jokes, alluding to the artisanal catalogues of faux marble patterns and wood grain textures they look at for inspiration.
From their library, Frieling draws out a book on Scandinavian peasant furniture. “Look, these historical cabinets are outrageously exuberant! Everything I like is here: geometry, order, organic elements, landscapes . . . The number of colors is limited, yet it’s dazzlingly rich. Doing a lot with limited means—that’s what our work is about as well.” According to Wouters, they use around fifteen unique pigments, but no more than five or six for each object. “We spend a lot of time developing clusters of colors that look complex as a result from working with gradients, contrast, and placement.”
The cabinets transformed by FreelingWaters have found their way to museum collections and private owners alike and have led to related spin-off projects like murals, textile designs, or a kite design. The flat studies on the walls of their studio only have a short lifespan. When they fall victim to the whitewash brush, the new cabinet murals go on to adorn friends’ and clients’ interiors in their own right.
Harmen Liemburg is a graphic designer, screen printer, and educator based in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
Related Stories
