"Have done nothing else than create… Creation is my life, my soul, my everything." Kees Verkade, 13 June 2014 orstiaan (known as Kees) Verkade was born in Haarlem (The Netherlands) in 1941, the son of Willem and Adriana Verkade. He dreamt of working in the advertising industry as drawing had been a passion from a very young age. His parents allowed him to indulge his talents after school with Amsterdam artist Gerrit van’t Net (1910-1971). With his encouragement, Verkade produced beautiful Cubist-influenced still-lives in striking shades of blue: Stilleven 1 and Stilleven 2 (gouaches, 1955). But the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam where he hoped to train would not admit the young school-leaver – not because of his work but of his father’s position as the Director of a mattress factory – too right wing and fortunate. Luckily his talent was recognised by another artist, lithographer Aart van Dobbenburgh who was teaching graphic design at the Royal Academy in The Hague. As there were no available places on the commercial art course at the time, the 16 year-old Verkade was told to do a year in the sculpture department after which he could join the advertising classes. A happy coincidence that would affect the rest of his life… He enjoyed it so much that he stayed on and has been sculpting ever since. ...In 1970, TIME Magazine devoted an entire article to ‘the shy Dutch artist’ entitled “The Hottest Underground Sculptor”. From then on, commissions flooded in. The Hirshhorn Sculpture Collection Museum in Washington bought several figures. He was commissioned to design a large-scale sculpture for the Columbia University Law School in New York in memory of the lawyer Bill Donovan who, during the Second World War, was head of the OSS (now called CIA)....The statue depicts the balance of Law. Kees Verkade represented Bill Donovan as a tightrope walker with someone... (Continued at http://www.keesverkade.com/en/biography.html) undefined

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