“Art liberates our eyes, our heart, our thinking.”

This one-liner from Bob Daenen’s latest book summarizes his vision on art, on living a creative life as a way to detect, reveal beauty, create moments, events of happiness and offering those to others. Creating, or experiencing “Art” gives us the possibility to surmount, surpass our limitations, liberating our restricted vision, opening our heart further, lifting our thinking by triggering our imagination. Each form of expression, each art-discipline has particular potential ànd restrictions or technical limitations. Each artist has to learn those and challenge these limits. During his 47 years ongoing career, Bob Daenen searched to push, stretch the horizon of those limitations, to deepen the chosen art form or to grow laterally into other art-disciplines that offer him more adequate expression potential. This multi-disciplinary approach has never been a goal on itself, but a logical and natural growth-process, a holistic vision in his work and daily life. When we walk in nature, we live, observe and take-in with all our senses simultaneously. We see the colors and shapes, we smell the pine-trees, we touch the flowers, and taste the herbs while listening to the wind. We interchange senses (which are our tools) rapidly and spontaneously without “segmentation” or judgment, but as a “total” experience through natural merging. Living art or “producing” art is similar; we chose the tool(s) or art form(s) that offers us the best expression-potential for a given creative goal, as portrait in Bob Daenen’s works:

Industrial design is often classified as “applied or commercial art”, which comes over as a second-class rating. This unfortunate (and useless) judgment is due to this recent profession, often unknown and miss-understood. The historical handicraft-maker evolved to industrial creator or designer with “industry” as the “maker”. This transition caused various forms of misunderstanding (still today): In the “Art” (with a-capital) circles, by lack of interest and understanding, in the industrial world, by misconception and the old friction between “ engineer & artist”, in the commercial world by cheap marketing labeling of design as the “pretty façade”, the “facelift-syndrome”, or by false publicity. While design today forms the creative bridge between the industrial/technological-, the marketing- and the consumer’s-world by innovative & meaningful products.

Graphic Design is a visual “communication-art” closer & better understood by the public due to the daily contact with layout and typography in the printed press, the publicity, TV and other (non printed) visual media.