11 October 2026
Painter of light: the style of Jos Antens
On his own site Jos Antens calls himself a “painter of light”. He mainly paints landscapes and cityscapes. He started in airbrush, later worked a lot in watercolour and “recently mostly in oil”, usually on panel.
The light often decides what he paints. The word backlight (tegenlicht) keeps returning in his descriptions, as with Nispen in tegenlicht. Of Rucphen bij avond (Rucphen at night) he writes: “when evening falls and the floodlights are on the church of Rucphen, you get a fine complementary colour contrast.”
He also looks at other painters. A watercolour from 2023 was “copied from Mesdag in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam”, and in 2024 he painted the Matterhorn in de kleuren van Zorn (the Matterhorn in the colours of Zorn).
And he puts techniques side by side. At the autumn workshop of the Aquarel Instituut België he made a “study in 3 techniques, pencil, gouache and watercolour, which is more beautiful?”. Of pastel pencil he writes that it is “more like painting than normal pencil because of its opaque character”. He also made a linocut of the Matterhorn using the reduction technique.
About that mountain he says: “At first I found it a very difficult shape to paint, but nowadays I can dream it.”