In 1993 after a long career in the arts, art teaching and art commissions Peter Jansen left his home base The Hague in the Netherlands and together with his wife Louise he started an almost non-stop travel of 20 years around the world. His studio was replaced by a digital camera and a laptop computer with graphic software and he started to record these endless travels. He reverted to his old habit of occasionally making panoramic pictures of places he used to stumble across. Already in 1978 he made one of the first, a quintuple piece of the sky between Rue Benoit and Rue de Rennes in Paris. Only in 1982 and still in analogue prints the first so called ‘Vista’ – as he called them from this time – was a view of West 53rd Street made from the 35th floor of the New York Hilton. From 1993 on, during the start of his journey across the world, more of these vistas followed. In a way they are characterized by a technique that resembles ‘painting with photo prints’.
While the old panoramic works are more or less narrative images, from this time on the vistas became more abstract. Every single print might be seen as part of a long brush stroke. Looking in detail at these works one might observe several layers of attention: the choice and concept of the subject, the effect of colour, the artist’s position, his sometimes iconic subjects, his varied concentration during the pace of time while creating the sometimes 50 or more ‘brush strokes’. But always resulting in unexpected forms, from straight lines to strange curves, a scattered field of almost unintentionally grouped pictures or on the other hand a carefully planned result. In abandoned deserts, from the roof of a hotel or on a mountain top. Or in a flat Dutch polder-land. The dimensions may vary from small graphics to monumental wall dimensions, depending on the size of the individual prints. The largest realized size is 20 meters, ‘Flat Earth’, a huge wall in the Rotterdam Subway.
