Thank you for visiting my website and taking your time to see my paintings and reading the stories, where I painted the portraits like this, why and how they came about.
My name is B.J.M. Kleiberg (Britt) and I was born in the summer of 1980.
My father spoke about Brigitte Bardot;
I would love animals just as much as she does.
Becarefull what you wishing for.
When I was 10 years old I started painting. First the small insects and birds up close,
later I became loyal to COBRA.
But everything changed, and it still does. Only my love for animals, that remains and is getting stronger.
‘Worldly Creatures’
Animals and different cultures inspire me. I paint animals from all over the world.
I call them ‘Worldly Creatures’
That in combination with ‘world music’, which started with putumayo.
I painted some animals after they became known through the news, with some I had a special meeting and furthermore I prefer to paint animals back to freedom. At the same time they symbolize all their kind who live ‘behind the scenes’ and I hope that it makes people think.
Turning a negative image into a positive. Like developing a negative from a film roll into a colorful photo.
I think it is important to guard the ‘treasures’ of the world, for our children and they for their children.
“We cannot tame a wild animal. And we should not want to.”
‘Well behaved’ l ‘Wild thing’ A tiger in a zoo. Our domestic cat, related to the felines, does not see us, humans, as a god but as servants. They are intelligent and we humans only know half of what they do every day.
As for the tiger, the tiger does not think of people … His image is powerful, the tiger is an animal in his own wilderness.
In captivity, sitting here like a domestic cat on the concrete floor, the tiger no longer knows who he is.
The portraits of the women in Santiago: One of the Cape Verde Islands:
These women wait at the fruit markets with baskets on their heads. The birds do not live on Santiago, but they have flown over from another continent.
Here I want to show that freedom can take you anywhere. In my world animals can roam freely. The jewelry in the portraits is inspired by kazuribeads from Kenya
-Everything is connected.
The portrait of the rhino is one of ‘Sudan’.
He was the last living male northern white rhino who died at the age of 45.
He was the future, but now history.
Climate change is real and it is palpably getting closer. I try to show this in my works. The central animals were and are and remain topical. I literally painted them on the news. Layers of newspapers that later turned into old sheet music when I highlighted the series of dutch birds. Still lifes emerged from the silent period we entered. The song and the silent thrush; we think so much but we don’t say everything we think. As a result, there are too few song thrushes and we need them to allow each other freedom.
Over the last few years I have been examining a series of birds ‘Dutch birds’. Immersing myself in their departure in the winter. These
portrayed in combination with sheet music. I love still lifes and neoclassical tones. These take you worldwide,
but also keep you very close to home.