Hans Heyting

Hans Heyting (13 August 1918 – 9 June 1992), born Johannes Heijting was a Dutch poet, playwright, radio personality, children's book writer and painter.

Writing in Drèents (except for his Dutch-language children's books and some poems in Dutch), he was one of the earliest Drèents writers to express personal themes and is considered to have been "the first true, modern Drèents poet who innovated old forms and showed new ways".

Heyting was born along the Beilervaart, not far from the village of Beilen.

He and his three sisters grew up in a poor family of gereformeerd (reformed) creed.

His father was a clogmaker and poached on the side to add to the family income; in his spare time he painted and drew.

Reflected on his father's artistic activity, Hans noted that he "painted small landscapes, very primitively, with brushes made of his own hair. When he'd been to the barber, he took tufts of hair with him. Ja! None of his work was kept."

When he was about ten, his father died; he and his sister found the body.

From this point on, Heyting - who detested the suffocating atmosphere at the reformed school - became alienated from his surroundings.

He remarked on his faith that he was taught: "I felt God was spying on me all day long. At night I sensed an angel standing by the bed. I was terrified because I could feel the draught of his wings beating."

Around this time he met his later fellow Drèents poet, Roel Reijntjes, who was also from Beilen.

Heyting was expelled from vocational school in Hoogeveen for blowing up the bicycle shed with a homemade bomb.

Various contacts outside his family caused the rift between him and his background to grow; later he would cut the ties completely.

He worked as an electrician's apprentice and a Paperboy for some time.

Because of a humpback - presumably caused by rickets - Heyting was unable to perform strenuous physical labour.

He was trained as a painter at the studio of Louis Kortenhorst in Assen, painting mainly children's portraits.

The journalist and religion teacher G.A. de Ridder, whose children he portrayed, introduced him to literature.

Heyting's interest in art and literature grew when he met Hendrik Fernhout, an authority on literature who was being cared for at psychiatric institution Beileroord.

Fernhout especially familiarized Heyting with the poet Rilke.

Heyting's physician Meijering proved another influence on his intellectual development.

Heyting made friends, and fell in love, with Ina Konings, a girl who was sixteen years younger and who lived next door to the Heytings.

He painted and drew her and gave her a prominent place in his later poems and children's books.

It was long thought that she died of tuberculosis at age thirteen and because of this, lived on as Heyting's muse.

Heyting stated: "She has become my inspiration. She always shows up in my work. (...) Because she died, she stayed alive for me."

In 1944, during World War II, Heyting went in hiding at a general practitioner's in the village of Borger.

He later said, "At the end of the war, in 1944, I got in trouble with Fritz. I went about freely and that was no longer permitted. I was afraid I'd be arrested."

He briefly returned to Beilen just after the war, but memories of his reformed childhood drove him back to Borger, where he would stay for the rest of his life.

He painted in the post-war years, joined the Drents Painters Society and wrote about painting in the periodicals Erica, Drenthe, and Nieuwe Drentsche Volksalmanak.

In 1946, Heyting lived for a while with painter Anton Heyboer, whose interest in Drenthe had been fanned by Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo.

In the same year, Heyting joined the painters' association De Drentse Schilders (which existed from 1946 to 1954) and exhibited his work in Assen and Emmen.

Following the exhibitions, he got many commissions for portraiture, but he had a growing conviction that he lacked the requisite talent.

About this he wrote in a poem, "Is it pointless? Something fleeting, this laborious digging down? / Has everything he does not been done better?"

The Drentse Schilders collective disintegrated due to conflicts between members; at one point, Heyting and two of his colleagues had spent the association's funds on booze.

The portraits painted by Heyting are in various private collections.

In 1954, Heyting married Wilhelmina Carolina Hilverink ('Wil') from Hengelo.

Heyting became a stage director at the dramatic society of Borger.

At private parties after performances, he often recited his work, played the lute and sung his own compositions.

Many of his paintings were destroyed when the museum farm he was living in burnt down in 1967.

The few extant still lifes show an affinity with the Magic Realist style.

After the fire, Heyting focussed more on writing, and "gradually his work took on a literary dimension".

However, in 2005 Drèents scholar Henk Nijkeuter established that she was still alive and living abroad.