Pieter Doef —In the Service ofArt and Humanity

Pieter Doef —In the Service ofArt and Humanity - theHumm August 2016

Fifteen years ago, theHumm was pleased and privileged to feature artist and sculptor Pieter Doef as our profiled artist in April 2001. The headline read “Pieter Doef — A Life-long Art of Giving.” I was tempted to use the same title for this update; Doef’s artistic productivity and humanitarian generosity remain unabated as he reaches his 89th birthday.

Again this year the indefatigable artist is donating artworks to raise money for Child Haven International, the charity that has so influenced his art and his life since 1986. When he retired that year he travelled to India with a former colleague, fell in love with the beauty and vibrant colours of the country, and embarked on a new artistic path.

Doef believes that there is a path picked out for you if you have the courage to take the opportunities that come your way. An exhibit of his paintings based on his first trip to India was held at Ottawa City Hall, and as karma would have it, Doef met Bonnie and Fred Cappuccino, founders and directors of Child Haven International. When he learned about the four Child Haven homes that then cared for approximately 450 children in India and Nepal, he decided he wanted to help.

Today Child Haven operates nine homes for destitute children, located in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet in China, and Lhasa. Their website at childhaven.ca describes their ongoing assistance to “children and women in developing countries, who are in need of food, education, health care, shelter and clothing, emotional and moral support.” The organization is also involved in environmentally-friendly projects, family planning, literacy and soya milk production as a cottage industry for groups of women.

Since then, Doef has contributed approximately $75,000 in support of Child Haven’s programs. For years he has donated two-thirds of commercial sales of his vivid, moving portraits of Indian life, allocating the remaining third for the supplies he needs to continue his unbroken stream of generosity. This year he has contributed twelve matted pastel drawings and one framed painting to be auctioned off at the Perth Child Haven annual fundraising event that will be held on September 16 at St. Paul’s United Church at 25 Gore St. W. The evening offers a vegetarian Indian dinner and items for sale, so it is a particularly beneficial opportunity to experience a small sample of Pieter’s eclectic art.

His paintings across the years reflect his wide-ranging interests, spanning cultures, locations and subjects. Art is to Pieter as work is to workaholics. He continues to indulge his endless curiosity, experimenting with media and techniques. After creating more than 400 cement sculptures over the past decades, many of which are on display at his country home near Merrickville, he has moved on to work with less weighty materials. It took me a moment to identify the snakeskin he has incorporated into several canvases. He creates collages by painting on wonderful “shoji” paper made from boiled mulberry tree bark, ripping them into pieces and then reassembling them into new and fascinating creations. When his wife, Wilhelmina, requested a painting of sunflowers one Sunday morning, he had a fabulous acrylic work hanging in their kitchen by the time she returned from church.

After 65 years of marriage, Wilhelmina’s death last year has strengthened the close bond Pieter shares with his daughter, Maria, who has created her own Shangri-La with her husband on an adjacent property. Like her father, she is a teacher, an artist, a gardener, and a lover of nature. Pieter is very glad that she is also an excellent cook.

An Art for Giving

At the end of WWII, Pieter met Wilhelmina, his pen pal while he was serving in Java as a (previously untrained) medic in the Dutch Marines. They fell in love, and immigrated to Canada in 1950 when they discovered they couldn’t get married because of a housing shortage in Holland. Thanks to a Canadian immigration officer in Brockville, they found themselves in Merrickville where Pieter was needed as a labourer on a mink farm. Nine months later he was bottling Coca Cola, and in 1955 he started as a caretaker at the Rideau Regional Centre for residents with developmental disabilities.

Pieter intuitively recognized the therapeutic qualities of art, and gradually convinced the institution to let him serve as (previously untrained) art therapist for the next thirty-one years until his retirement in 1986. He read books and took courses, and found ways to incorporate his students’ artistic efforts into murals, collages and backdrops for theatrical presentations. Their pleasure in their accomplishments was his reward.

In 2012 the Rideau Community Health Services honoured Pieter for his outstanding contribution to the community for over 55 years, and noted: “There are few artists who have shared their gift as generously as Pieter, and our citizens and communities continue to benefit from these gifts.” They cited examples of Doef’s contributions — his career in art therapy at the Rideau Regional Centre, art classes in local communities, his works on public display in Smiths Falls (Centennial Park) and Perth, and as a founding member of the Merrickville Artists Guild. He also loans artworks to the Merrickville District Community Health Centre, providing “warmth and an important bright spot for all to share.”

An Art for Living

Pieter is an ardent advocate of living according to the teachings of anthroposophy, defined by its founder, Rudolf Steiner as “a path of knowledge aiming to guide the spiritual element in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.” Steiner proposed what he termed a “fundamental law” of social life: “The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.” The more I researched this human-oriented spiritual philosophy (I recommend waldorfanswers.com), the more I grew to understand and respect Pieter Doef’s embrace of its theories. Actions speak louder than words, and Doef’s life is a striking affirmation of his beliefs.

Art aficionados are welcome to browse through the many studios at his home, and he has works on display at the Grotto Artworks in Merrickville, so check out his Artist Trading Card for particulars. He and his art are well worth meeting.