Introducing Badeklasser Sandra Hendrix

Sandra Hendrix (47) is a highly versatile artist from Heerlen. She draws and paints, but also creates sculptures and clothing. In addition to being an artist, she also gives workshops and is involved with all sorts of other creative activities. “For as long as I can remember I’ve been doing art. For that reason I was once enrolled at art school, but in the end I swapped it for teacher training. For a long part of my teaching career I had nothing to do with art, save for a few poems I wrote. But after a few years I began to get the itch. I was encouraged to take up painting again, so that’s what I did.”

Defining mark

Around six years ago she picked up the artist’s brush again. “It was a strange feeling, I had to readjust. What was my defining mark? I’ve since found my feet again. My style is expressive and intuitive: I aim to make a splash! Often I work myself into a trance without really trying. I don’t need to be a Rembrandt, but what is important is to study the creative aspect. It’s all about enjoying it.” Currently Sandra is being more abstract in her work, but also with collage techniques and landscapes. She laughs: “Okay, it’s a mix of everything, I know. That’s how it always seems to go.”

Symbolic

For the photo Sandra was asked to bring an item that had some personal significance for her. She chose her rucksack. “I thought about it for a little while and at first I thought about a painting, or a sketchbook I shared with my late father, who was also an artist. But I decided on the rucksack. Not only does it have a practical use but a symbolic meaning. Being an artist is like having something you can regularly put something into, but also take something out. Like life itself. Some things you carry with you, some things longer than others. I attach great value to freedom and I like to let go of what others think. So it regularly gets emptied. At a practical level, the rucksack is of great value to me: it travels everywhere with me. For example, to Spain, where I recently travelled and spent time painting. It contains my artists materials and my folder. It’s something I can’t do without,” explains Sandra.

Sandra regularly exhibits - in Spain too - but like a true artist, she’s never too good to stop learning. Recently she watched a series of ‘Project Rembrandt’ on TV, which gives a stage to new artistic talent. The series has inspired her to keep on learning. “Contestants spend a month or more working on a painting. That intrigued me. That’s a different way of working. I would like to learn how to take more time to study in depth, in terms of structuring a work.”

Badeklasse

Any questions she has, however detailed, Sandra can now put to David Bade and her fellow artists in Badeklasse. She has been participating now since last November. “I saw that they were looking for people last year, so I responded immediately – intuitively if you like. I didn’t need to think twice about it. I knew David’s work and the whole idea appealed to me. I went along in October and to my delight I was ‘accepted’. So far, so good: I like a lot that we work as a kind of sounding board for each other. We are all independent artists, each and everyone has their own background. That’s interesting, because you can see the diversity of each other’s art.”

Each has their own mark

Participants are currently working on a joint assignment, each in their own different way. “It’s fascinating to see how everyone produces a different work of art from the same information. That’s extremely educational. We get feedback from David – not so much ‘perhaps, another brushstroke here’, but more advice on things like composition and use of light – and we have a lot of discussions and collaborations with each other. This way you learn more and more about the person behind the artwork. The feedback we receive is extremely constructive, but the best thing is, you can take it or leave it. And that’s just fine.”

Read more about Badeklasse here >