Beeing Living 1974

Curator: This drawing by Anton Heyboer, etched in 1974, bears the intriguing title "Beeing Living". I can’t help but feel this work pulses with a raw, existential anxiety. Editor: Anxiety is right, but I see a quiet, insistent hope nestled within that starkness. The palette is reduced, the forms primitive, yet there's something undeniably captivating about the sheer sparseness of it all. A field of what seems to be small plants dominates the lower half. Above that we can see the titular, almost graffitied words. What do you notice about the character walking the plane between the two? Curator: I feel drawn to the stark symbolism of that figure, too. Isolated against the vastness of the horizon, walking what looks like the edge of this field of verdant growth. The large cross behind it is ominous, like the crossroads between heaven and earth, mortality and something beyond. The way it disrupts what would otherwise be a horizon… it just makes you ask: what's that figure heading towards? Or running from? Editor: Absolutely. Those intersecting lines serve as a potent visual cue, conjuring ancient mappings of sacred spaces or alchemical diagrams – a testament to Heyboer's deeply personal iconography. The being there has a kind of purity to its symbolic nature: it's a sort of Adam archetype setting out into a brave new world, if the scrawled handwriting over top wasn't quite so forbidding. But its vulnerability also makes it incredibly potent, because its meaning relies entirely on what the individual brings to it. Curator: Right – "Beeing Living" hints at the essence of existence, but the distorted spelling seems to add a layer of fragility, a precarious grasp on what it truly means to *be*. There's also the rough, almost rushed quality of the etching that contributes to the emotional effect of uncertainty. Heyboer seems to capture what living feels like. The plants at the bottom of the figure seem to reflect this living ideal—and if one can make such a leap from looking—perhaps also that ideal as it extends to our relationships, our families and chosen groups of like beings. It all asks, “What is our place?" Editor: The landscape itself isn’t naturalistic at all but a mindscape where symbolic language prevails. This isn’t just a depiction; it is a visual rendering of what Heyboer believed: his lived experiences manifest into abstract form, and offered on a single sheet of etched paper, allowing for anyone, across the boundaries of time and space, to consider it alongside him. Curator: So well put! It really does leave one to wonder what landscapes we build ourselves for these very questions. What could we ask of a little “beeing living” out there today?