Barbara Schroeder

Rooted Art – Inspired by Van Gogh

“When I say that I am a peasant painter, then that is truly what I am; I feel at home there.”

— Vincent van Gogh

This sentence, which I discovered at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, resonates deeply with my own work. Like Van Gogh, I explore rural life — not as a picturesque image, but as a world made of gestures, materials, and memories.

During my visit to the museum, I was especially touched by Kreupelhout (Sous-bois), painted in 1889 at the asylum. In the tangled undergrowth Van Gogh revealed not just nature, but a living, visionary landscape where the pulse of life merges with artistic energy.

It is with this spirit that I created my residency project at Landgoed De Moeren: an exploration of the vital interconnection between soil, culture, and creative nature.

The Urhaus

At the heart of my working space rises the Urhaus — a fragile, primordial house built of bamboo, wrapped in old Dutch linens, and painted with manure from a neighboring farm.

The Urhaus is not a fixed architecture, but a porous, breathing shell. A place of origin and return. It reminds us that we come from the earth, that it nourishes us, and that one day we return to it. Inside, the scents of hay and manure mix with the sight of water, evoking both sustenance and vulnerability.

For me, the Urhaus is a language of reconnection — with the soil that gives us birth, feeds us, and ultimately embraces us again.

Rituals and Presences

In the video performance ATE (Air, Terre, Eau), projected onto the Urhaus, my white work suit — once smeared with soil in a Paris Métro as a shamanic act — now heals a sick tree, plunges into water, and returns to the earth.

Around the house, manure spheres float like seeds or small planets. Beneath them, a bowl of ground manure releases the scent of humus.

Four forgotten women’s names from Zundert — Bets, Janneke, Nelleke, Truus — take silent shape through dresses coated in manure, hanging like humble silhouettes: guardians of the land, dignified yet invisible.

Painting with Decay

My paintings speak of corn smut, a black fungus that infects maize: a metaphor for the fragility of industrial agriculture. What first appears grotesque reveals an unexpected, almost seductive beauty. I bind its black dust into a natural pigment. Manure, too, becomes pigment, seeping beneath charcoal drawings of local forests, trees, and roots — echoing the Romantic painters I studied at the Rijksmuseum.

A Peasant Art

Van Gogh’s underwoods were never mere landscapes: they were refuges, thresholds, places of attentiveness to life. This is also what I seek — a slower, more porous way of engaging with materials, until they become forms, traces, and shared gestures.

Art becomes peasant in the truest sense: rooted, sensitive, inseparably bound to the rural world that gives birth to it.