Because of their beauty
This website presents around 70 works of art, a minute portion of her complete works. The selection presented here has been determined in large part by what Walty considered her best work. To these I have added a number of paintings remarkable for their dynamism, colour and sophistification, or simply because of their beauty.
Early on in her career Walty was exact in photographing and documenting her work, but later on she was simply too busy to bother. In 2010 I began
listing/making an inventory of all her original artwork. Since then I have traced, photographed and coded over 2500 works of art, adding all to the Walty archive.
Anyone owning an original Walty that might not have been documented, would help us considerably by sending us a photograph.
This is a website still ‘under construction’ and we expect to continue work on it well into the future. I will ensure that all new information about Walty and her work will be communicated through this website.
A great number of persons have contributed in one way or the other in enabling this digital publication. To all of you my heartfelt thanks.
Frans 'Beer' Trompert
Copyright exists on all images and/or texts on this website. Please direct enquiries to me concerning the use of images and parts of the text for publicational purposes.
More then three thousand works
This website strives to give a concise overview of the life and work of Dutch artist
Walty Dudok van Heel (1959 - 2009). During her lifetime she produced an estimated three thousand drawings, paintings and sculptures. At least seven hundred animal lovers have had their pet portrayed by Walty.
Because of her comprehensive knowledge of animals and nature Walty appeared as a regular guest of radio and television programmes, and of magazines. The combination of her work and such appearances turned her into a celebrity. A wide audience got to know her illustrations through her books, calendars and her popular columns on nature observations in the Dutch weekly
Margriet.
Mugs, desk agenda’s, greeting cards, the annually recurrent products decorated with Walty’s popular illustrations that flooded the market might have progressively obscured Walty the painter and sculptor who, as an exceptionally talented artist has earned our continued interest.
Walty Dudok van Heel concludes her study at the academy of fine arts d’Witte Leli in Amsterdam in 1984. Since graduating she specializes in drawing and painting animals, and especially animals in motion.
The combination of her remarkable talent and her detailed anatomical knowledge and the years spent in observing animals she develops the knack of evoking life and movement in her subjects. Her work appears in most major European nature magazines, and her paintings are spread all over the world.
She earns a reputation in the United States when her work is selected four times in a row for the annual international exhibition
Birds in Art with which the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum (Wausau) tours the country. The exhibition also tours outside the USA. People also want to touch animals besides looking at them. No one realizes this better than Walty, so she decides to try her hand in three-dimensional work. After months of painstaking study and experimenting a first bronze is cast, proving that even in sculpture she manages to perfectly capture animals in motion.
In spite of worries about her health Walty cheers up considerably when she stubbornly decides to learn to draw with her left hand, labelling this new technique as 'lefthanded'. Starting out as a gimmick it developes into a genre all its own focused on cows, frogs and pigs, animals with an infectious zest for life.
