Martijn Composes Life
I am watching Martijn Doolaard build his stone houses in Northern Italy, and I realized he is really an artist. Yes, he is a painter and a designer. He is also a videographer. He puts together a mosaic of pictures of his life in the Italian mountains, and he does it masterfully.
I have followed him from the very beginning some five years ago. YouTube algorithm brought me his first videos, because I was looking for some advice with fixing my house, but something worked for me, and I stayed. Probably it was the scenery, his idea to reconstruct two ruins, his enthusiasm. It was not because I imagined myself in his place, living a peaceful life in the mountains. I don’t crave that. It is his mastery in showing mundane things so that they are worth watching.
Why people watch
Almost a million people subscribe to his channel. Many of them spend almost an hour every week on these small, slow pacing videos. What do they see there?
I think this is modern video art. It is similar to the paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Think of Brueghel: the countryside, people working in a field, scenes from home, mountains, farm animals. His Paradise. Why do we find such paintings valuable and worth our time? Because they show a particular moment in life, in the year, in a culture. They have an atmosphere that breathes from the canvas. Why would anyone appreciate a painting of a butcher shop from the 16th century? Joachim Beuckelaer painted one in 1568. It lets us look into a space and time that an average bystander would never see. And it was painted masterfully.
Sometimes it is just a brief pencil scratch or a watery aquarelle, and it still evokes a feeling or a memory. Sometimes we learn something new. Other times we just enjoy how the picture makes us feel.
His roots
Martijn comes from the region that gave us the most famous Flemish and Dutch painters: Bosch, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals. Maybe something of that was passed on to him. One difference: Bosch and Brueghel often made moral points about human folly. Martijn doesn’t. He just shows that there is another possibility to how most of us accepted to live in the modern world. He even paints his own pictures and offers them to his audience.
The composition
But a painting is just one moment, and his videos are not. They unfold in time, so I think they are closer to a musical composition. They have rhythm and pacing. His way of composing is in what he shoots, how he shoots it, how he changes from shot to shot, and what he chooses to show. It is visual, aural and videographic all at once.
Here is what I mean. There is his wooden chicken house with the majestic mountains behind it in early fall green. Then he walks in, and the picture is completely different. Then he walks away, and the chickens follow him like pets. Then comes a high-flying drone view, following his drive down a serpentine road and up the mountain. Wide, then close, then moving. A painter arranges a canvas. He arranges time.
He uses music very sparingly. The only real music comes at the end. It is the sign that the final monologue is coming, usually finishing with a view of the mountains. I guess copyright plays a part in this choice too. Either way, it works.
Most films today cost millions of dollars and try to shock, overwhelm, deceive or scare us. His videos are the opposite. They are slow, true to reality, and true to their creator. Simply, they please one’s soul.
The man behind the camera
Martijn was a graphic designer and filmmaker before any of this. He cycled from Amsterdam to Singapore, and later from Vancouver to Patagonia, and wrote books about both trips. Then came the Alps. We followed his struggles: the winter in a tent on his mountain land, the ruin restored into a livable home, the long fight for approval to build his own stone house, and now restoration of the second old house.
Some viewers come in person from all over the world to help for a few days. They work, enjoy the scenery, and eat and drink together by the evening fire on the slope. At other times his family comes from Holland, his father, mother and brothers, and they help and enjoy being together.
I understand, that this may not be everyone’s idea of spending time watching how some guy in the Italian mountains is at one moment putting together a new door from hundred years old wooden planks taken from the old floor, like an experienced carpenter. Then rebuilding a stone roof. After that, cooking his dinner from what the nature and his own effort has allowed to grow on his land, while watching old Italian movie. But it is cinematic and truly artistic, pleasing, and peaceful. Maybe you could check one of his videos. The link is up, on the first line.
Photo: YouTube screengrab
