Dorothy Dudok van Heel - Jansen

Dorothy Jansen (1919 - 1967) received her degree in drawing and handicraft in 1941. She worked as a schoolteacher, but also took commissions, e.g. that same year for Veilig Verkeer Nederland (Safe Traffic Netherlands). In the 1950s she produced for the VVN a well-known series of cartoons featuring penguins that were meant to enlarge children’s awareness of the rules and dangers of traffic. During these years she also worked as an art instructor at the sanatorium for asthma patients in Davos, Switzerland, and she designed publicity material for the sanatorium.

The photocopy of a letter in Walty's archive shows Dorothy as a charming and inspiring personality, and a proud mother besides!
Walty drew a sweet nag for you, “sad horse" she calls it, she wrote to her ill niece Charlotte on 15 March 1966. [...] Walty asked me to frame her horse. This I have done.

Dorothy’s influence on the development of her daughter’s talent would probably have been greater if she had not passed away so early in life.

The other side of the coin

Walty is only 8 when her mother passes away. So convinced as Walty is that she has inherited the drawing gene from her mother, so worried is she that she also inherited the gene that killed her mother. She feels her talent also has a darker side. When in 2006 the same disease is diagnosed in Walty, she considers this, in a way, as the price she has to pay fro her artistic abilities.

Inherited talent

Can talent be handed down? Walty thought so and had her reasons. In all likelihood she had her mother to thank for her photographic memory and finely tuned body control. Even if no genetic cross-over had taken place, her mother still had a decisive part in the development of Walty’s talent, because she put drawing in the centre of the family’s lives.

Introduction

Hares will run and birds will fly. Walty had a great admiration for the old masters, men like Albrecht Dürer or Melchior de Hondecoeter, because of the masterly way they managed to convey the lines of an animal’s body or the softness of its fur. But Walty also looked critically at the plethora of animal artists: It looks as if the animals were stuffed, mounted on a branch. They hardly look alive.

It is in the representation of animal locomotion that Walty excelled. Her foxes, roe deer and dolphins look very much alive. Of course, she learned a lot from the old masters. The fur of her fox and hare seem so tactile and soft that you want to stroke them.

In many interviews Walty talks about how important it is for her to touch an animal:
If I haven’t touched it, I cannot represent it.

She more than once let slip that it is here where her “secret” lays, but that is really far too simple. For one, Walty has a head start: she has talent. A talent for drawing that was passed down to her by her mother, who was an artist, too.

Seldom does Walty mention all those years of intense preparation, of study and experimentation, observation and analysis. These factors form the foundation of her success. Add to these her energy and that exceptional drive in wanting to become familiar in great detail with animal anatomy and behaviour. It is then we might understand why she was unique in capturing so unerringly both the animal as its movements.