Beauty is a mystery. The artist is attracted to a given subject. He experiences it, and the then- created work is something new: the objective reality that the artist has seen, but with an addition: the artist’s experience itself. The created work is something that has never existed before.

To write about such an event is somewhat foolish. With words we try to define, but beauty cannot be defined, only experienced. We experience beauty in front of a Sung Dynasty porcelain from 600 years ago,from a Lascaux cave painting of 20,000 years ago. The experience of beauty is outside of time and place.

Merijn van den Ende is an unusual painter for this time. He is part of no ‘movement.’ In his work he does not pretend to offer us a moral lesson or a struggle for ‘social justice.’ He has no interest, at least in his art, in transforming the world. He’s here. He’s himself. He looks at this mysterious world, at waves breaking on a shore, at animals in the wild. These things are beautiful to him, important to him, and his way of seeing them gives us the experience of beauty.

When I saw some of his earliest wave paintings I felt like I was looking at the ocean as we see it in a dream. Some years later, I stood in front of a Liberian night scene, a quiet ocean under a dark blue sky. I felt I was there on the day God created the waters, before the creation of the first man.

But words fail. Beauty can’t be explained, only experienced. Those who reveal it to us are in a brotherhood that transcends time. Merijn is part of that brotherhood.

Gibbons Cooney

San Francisco 2016