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Porsche 911 RSR in Wood ???

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Porsche 356 collage, carved out of redundant, unaltered wood, by Diederik Kraaijeveld

Could Porsches be made out of wood? Absolutely, and I’ll tell you how, with the help of a long lost friend.

When I was 16-17 years old, we hung out at hockey and soccer club member parties in The Hague with a group of about 15 guys. We all arrived together, all wore a yellow sports jacket and adored Billy Joel. The man I’m going to write about was a mate of mine in that era, and we lost touch about 30 years ago.

Diederick Kraaijeveld is by now a well known artist in a niche all his own: Images composed out of redundant wood. He and I hooked up again after all these years via LinkedIn. He invited me over to his atelier in Hilversum where we would attempt to fill in 30 years of blanks….

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Diederick Kraaijeveld with some of his outstanding works

Diederick finished university and worked as a television investigative journalist. In that capacity he won a prestigious prize and subsequently turned his back on his “traditional” career in 2007. On the side he had been making art out of obsolete material, varying from Gauloises cigarette packs to wood.

His technique is very organic. Diederick doesn’t treat or even clean the wood. He travels a lot and brings back wood from all over the world, especially gathering a variety of colors which others have applied, sometimes decades ago. He sorts all this wood by color in his atelier and combines the samples he needs to achieve reflections, shadows and other optical effects. The only treatment he applies is to cut the wood to shape.

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Detailed view of the inlaid wood which creates the illusion of reflections off the chromium bumper overrider of this Porsche 356.

His first works included many commissions for cars, in the style of the SWB Ferrari 250 GTO he holding in the picture above. Octane magazine picked up his skill and I couldn’t believe my eyes: there was Diederick in one of my favorite mags! Crazier still: I visited Monterey with my wife a few months later, walked into one of the many galleries (Amsterdam Gallery) and in the back I stumbled upon exactly this piece The Man is holding up in the picture! It didn’t get sold so Diederick took it back shortly after I saw it and decided to keep it as evidence of his early work.

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Self Portrait Diederick Kraaijeveld

Much in the style of the self Portait above, Diederick produced a couple of portraits of President Obama, one of which hangs in the US embassy in The Hague.

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Diederick Kraaijeveld demonstrating the Obama portraits

Diederick became famous to a wider audience for his series of Converse AllStar sneakers. He has made about 25 different versions to date and it is unbelievable how he has achieved to embed perspective in these mozaics. I shot the pair he still owns under a few angles so you can see how the material is composed to achieve this effect.

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AllStars by Converse in wood

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AllStars in wood in detail

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Awesome detail behind the scenes. Such a rough material yet a perfect picture.

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Diederick in his atelier with a mozaic in preparation of a British stamp. He has also done the 100 USD bill

The exciting news besides having had a great time catching up on a small piece of 30 years…. was that Diederick is preparing an exhibition in the Middle East and has been asked to bring a few samples of car mozaics. As we were talking about TwinSpark Racing, R Gruppe and what we do with our cars, Diederick got excited and decided he wants to picture The Hulk, our 1974 3.0 RSR in Vipergreen. I promised to lend him the steel front lid to get inspiration from this wild 70’s color. More on that exciting development in future blog entries.

For those of you who would like to see more of my friend’s work, I recommend you visit his www.oudhout.nl site. Porsche lovers looking for an original artwork can report to Diederick or to me to enquire about possibilities. Diederick’s portfolio of commissions is quite full so be ready for a bit of a wait. In my eyes though, this is one of the most original techniques I have seen in years!

1 Comment

  • diederick| August 26, 2010 at 9:23 am

    Thanks Leonard! For the english speaking readers: the english version of my site is http://www.oudhout.com

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