Antonien Rijksen has been working for the Karel Appel Foundation since 1999 as Curator Archive and Collection, and since 2021 as Deputy Director. Over the years she has gathered a unique visual knowledge about Karel Appel’s oeuvre. This allowed for her discovery that Karel Appel often used drawings as a starting point for paintings. 

Composing Images – Karel Appel’s use of drawings in the making of his paintings

That Karel Appel applied a classical method like starting from a drawing to make a painting challenges the still dominant stereotype of him being a spontaneous painter. Examples of this new discovery were published for the first time by Franz W. Kaiser in his 2016 Karel Appel. Retrospective at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (today Kunstmuseum).

In her presentation, Antonien Rijksen described this practice, juxtaposing paintings with reference drawings, that clearly had been used as starting point, differentiating such use of rediscovered drawings from the more classical use of preparatory sketches for the execution of large scale works such as murals and glass-stained windows. She also revealed that the artist had collected children's drawings early on and showed obvious links between some of those and his own drawings and paintings throughout his oeuvre.