Johann Heinrich Reindert van den Noort in his studio
Johann Heinrich Reindert van den Noort
Born January 7, 1940 in Kampen, the Netherlands. After a technical education he followed a course for drawing and painting at the Royal Evening Academy for Visual Arts in Amsterdam, in 1961- 1962. After that he was self-taught-man. Johann van den Noort lives and works in Kampen.
JOHANN VAN DEN NOORT is a Dutch visual artist and inventor. As a expressionist abstract artist he inextricably linked his oeuvre to his relationship with the sea. Van den Noort is a renaissance man who seeks out the added value of art, science and life and finds it in exciting cross-pollinations. His civil engineering innovations provide solutions for world problems that all have something to do with water.
As an artist, Van den Noort alone occupies a special position in contemporary visual art. But there’s more. Not only because he is driven by the sea, especially the way he gives form and substance to that passion, makes him an artist who has conquered a place of his own in contemporary painting and sculpture. JOHANNN VAN DEN NOORT has mastered many techniques such as: oil painting, watercolors, gouache, various graphic techniques, ceramics and sculpting. His total oeuvre comprises more than 4000 works. There are many publications from him in, art magazines, newspapers and catalogs and for radio and TV. Most of his work is in various art collections around the world.
Anyone who assumes that Van den Noort, as an inventor, operates in a strictly separate field of activity, is short of both the artist and the inventor. After all, the strength of the renaissance man lies in cross-border thinking and working. Red thread in everything he does is: water. But within this thematic limitation he claims all the freedom he deems necessary for his talents and insights to make use of projects that make a valuable, inventive contribution to solving world problems. Like his innovative projects, his works of art also derive from the experience of everything that has to do with water. Here too, it is all about enriching our existence with fresh ideas, special finds and insights and unexpected solutions. For Van den Noort, every work of art is an invention and every invention is a work of art. Johann van den Noort is often called “the Leonardo Da Vinci of the twentieth one century”.
JOHANN VAN DEN NOORT received many international awards for his innovations, such as the highly coveted EDISON AWARD in May 2013 for his design of the Twin Wing Tsunami Barrier. In 2005 he received for his entire oeuvre the Royal decoration of “KNIGHT in the ORDER of the DUTCH LION”. In 2014 he received the ‘HONORARY TOKEN’ in silver from the municipality of Kampen.