Theodore “Dick” De Groot
John Schmidtberger met and befriended the Dutch/American artist Theodore “Dick” De Groot in 2012, 7 years prior to his passing in 2019. John now represents his estate.
In the 1960s De Groot made the first prototypes of Lath Art pictures and set up a factory near Frenchtown, NJ to produce them. He partnered with New York-based Austin Productions to market and distribute the Lath Art, while also making modernist sculpture prototypes for them to produce and sell.
The Lath Art pieces were very popular, and the venture became a huge success. When De Groot retired from business in the 80s, he returned to painting full-time. Working in a surrealist style influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), his paintings went through a long distillation process wherein De Groot gradually eliminated extraneous details, leaving only the most essential elements.
Common themes run through his entire body of work, such as the vital urban environment, black humor, and loneliness.
While many Dick’s paintings have the feel of real places, people and things, they are actually “taken apart and put back together” as De Groot says, meaning they are “invented things and only exist for the artist to play with.”
In an interview De Groot once described his process:
"I refuse to paint sure-sellers such as the cute, the corny, the romantic, the sentimental, the narrative. My favorite subject is the contemporary American urban scene, which I find exciting and uniquely suited to my taste. I like to use clues that give an illusion of space, or only a suggestion of it around the corner or beyond the hill."
"The opposites of mass and space, of volumes and voids intrigue me. They are the basis of my compositions. The urban landscape is rich in geometric planes that can be arranged in expressive combinations of color and light-dark values. I want to see each element in my work in harmony with the total. That includes clouds, traffic signs, telephone poles etc. I will change the subject to suit my purpose. Things are moved, added or left out in a process of translating reality into a painted and new reality."
