Getting lost in a van in the American West
Winneke de Groot and Felix van Dam are a couple of Dutch graphic designers who work in a cherry orchard near Utrecht in the Netherlands, where they have a silkscreen and risography workshop.
Their studio is aptly named “We are out of office”. With a passion for travel, nature and the great outdoors, they are now taking us on a van tour of the American West.Getting lost in a van in the American West.
Could you tell us more about the context of this trip ?
In 2023 (April 19 to June 19) we traveled to the west coast of the United States for two months to attend an artist residency and to travel around a bit. During this period we also were part of two group exhibitions at Hashimoto Contemporary in Los Angeles. During the first month we travelled by car. Roughly from Los Angeles to Santa Fé via Joshua Tree and Petrified Forest. And from Santa Fé to Yosemite via Arches, Canyonland and Bryce National Parks. As you can see we did visit a lot of national parks and we hiked almost non stop. The reason we wanted to visit Santa Fé is the Museum of International Folk Art since we wanted to go there for a long long time already and it did not disappoint! In Yosemite we met up with some friends and after spending a week in the park we went back to Los Angeles to attend the opening of ‘Pith’ a group show at Hashimo to Contemporary we were part of.
After this first month we traveled a bit north to Healdsburg (jan hour north of San Francisco) to start with a month long artist residency at Chalk Hill Artist Residency. This part the trip consisted mostly of painting and making small trips in the area. Chalk Hill is a big ranch where they grow grapes. Somewhere on there enormous ranch there is an old wooden house for the artists to live and a big barn to work. The scenery is beautiful and the Russian River runs trough their land and ideal for swimming during the hot afternoon. As we’ve always painted objects we wanted to see what would happen when we would paint landscapes. This ended up in being a lot of paintings of buildings, signs, mailboxes etc. We liked to paint landscapes but somehow our attention moved to these other things instead.
Is there a place that particularly struck you ? Why or why not ?
Too many to point out. When we planned this trip we thought we would stay too long in the desert. It turned to out to be so diverse and beautiful that we could stay way longer. We have been in Yosemite before but this year there had been a lot of snow which made all the waterfalls and rivers so impressive, we kept on adding days to our stay there.
We were blown away by the Museum of International Folk Art. It’s enormous, one day is not enough to soak it all up.
Do you have an anecdote to share with us about this trip in the van ?
Well this wasn’t the first trip to the United States where we locked ourselves outside and we had to remove the airconditioning form the window to break in to our own apartment.
Why did this trip leave a particular impression on you ?
The nature in this country is out of this world. Spending so long outdoors did us really good. We really like the combination of traveling and working. It makes meeting local people more easy which helps to see places you will otherwise probably miss.
Has this trip influenced your work ? If so, in what way ?
This trip definitely influenced our work. Our work is always about our memories. Instead of making pictures we collect things that remind us of a certain place or experience. These things can be anything, a nice piece of packaging of a snack we had, a ruler, a piece of crayon we found, literary anything. All these collected objects have always been the centre of our work.
This trip made us realize we can paint things we can’t bring home. Barns, flowers, firewood signs etc. these things are also the subject of the collection we made for Olow.
