Jan van der Kooi
Jan van der Kooi (born in Groningen, January 16, 1957) is a Dutch painter and drawer in the style of figurative arts. He is often regarded as the best contemporary Dutch drawer and painter. Education. Van der Kooi spent his childhood in Bedum. From 1980 to 1983 he studied at the art Academy Minerva in Groningen, where his teachers were Matthijs Röling and Martin Tissing. Work. After his studies, he moved to the province of Friesland, where he started to work in the area of Drachten. Van der Kooi paints and draws landscapes, still lifes, portraits , nudes and animals. Van der Kooi particularly focuses on painting sunlight in different places and climates, such as Peru, Nepal and Israel. Every year he visits Italy, where he studies the sunlight and landscapes of Venice and Tuscany. Since 2007 he gives master classes at the Classical Academy for painters in Groningen, and since 2014 he gives master classes in the Middle East. An Israeli painter invited Van der Kooi to come and give seminars, because there are few classical painters in Israel and Palestine due to the region's relatively short history in classical art. In 2002 the life  and works of Van der Kooi were featured on the national news and a documentary on the Dutch national television; in 2004 the educational children's television series "Het Klokhuis" had an episode about Van der Kooi’s drawings of tigers. In 2007 his British friend and colleague Michael Reynolds invited Van der Kooi to participate in an exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London and later that year Dame Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley performed at the opening of Van der Kooi's exhibition in in Eelde. In 2009 the four Dutch figurative painters Matthijs Röling , Pieter Pander, Pieter Knorr and Jan van der Kooi were invited by a gallery owner in Antwerp to exhibit their works on a joint exhibition entitled "The four greats from the north". In 2012 posters of Van der Kooi’s tiger drawings were displayed at Dutch national railway stations to promote the exhibition in the Dordrechts Museum. Van der Kooi makes drawings in a book that was also used by Michelangelo and Raphael and which has been in the possession of Christina, Queen of Sweden.