Winfred Dania

I happened to learn about an art exhibit of the works of Winfred Dania, known as the “Van Gogh of Bonaire”. The artist’s works have been on display for at the Cultural Center in Bonaire and the display was going to be ending in a few weeks. I saw a show about the exhibit on TV a few days before I left the island for holiday, so I made sure that I made my way down there to see it before my chance was gone. As ordinary days pass, it’s rare to have an experience as inspiring as I had this day, I am so delighted that I didn’t miss the opportunity to see this exhibit and I encourage anyone on Bonaire to check it out while they still can.

Winfred was born in Aruba to a mother who was Aruban and his father was Bonairian. He had polio as a child which left him deaf. At the age of five, he was sent to school in the Netherlands, where he learned to speak and communicate through sign language until he was seventeen, when he came back to his father’s birthplace. He considered himself a true Bonairian, and expressed himself through painting.

The director of a local museum, Frans Booi, recognized his talent and they became friends. Frans asked Winfred to illustrate his writing about the mythology of Bonaire. Dania’s beautiful works combined spirituality, cultural history, mythology and personal expression. There were hidden figures and hidden meanings and specific arrangements with particular intent in his work. I was immersed in a time past while walking through the gallery with the scenes of the Indians, the crashing seas and mourning angels.

Dania started to paint abstract works once a year on his birthday and began to explore more modernism in the later years. Numerology was also very important to him and had a significance in his work, as well as arrangement and order. He started painting on blocks, and other three-dimensional objects making very specific instructions on how it was to be oriented and displayed. One series of works is a group of small paintings that is displayed in an specific arrangement on the wall.

Surrealism, numerology, modernism, mythology… so many different aspects of art in this exhibit, I felt like I was in the Museum of Fine Arts, yet all of his work had a consistent feeling that somehow connected all the pieces together and to the viewer.

Like Van Gogh, Dania was not well known until after his death in 2012. Since then, his work has been on display, most recently this magnificent display of over one hundred pieces of his life’s work. The painting he was working on when he passed away is mounted on his easel in the back corner of the exhibit. What they did with it I found to be quite inspiring.

You are left to imagine what he intended to add to the canvas, what he dreamed would be the finished painting. In Bonaire, they had the school children study the works of Dania, and then they were given a copy of his last painting and were asked to finish it in the way they imagined Dania would have painted. What a wonderful way to engage the children in honoring one of their national treasures.