I first heard about Keith, aka TF Dutchman after interviewing our favorite Jersey City street artists; Distort, Mustart and Clarence Rich who are all part of the same crew with Dutch. Keith is not your typical street artist, he primarily does art in the form of stained glass and only does street art as a means to promote his artistry. When you think of stained glass, you think of what you see at religious places like churches and temples but Dutch’s work is more contemporary and I’ve never seen anything like it. He is an extremely talented artist and is now offering stained glass classes at the Grassroots community center to those who are interested in picking up this very cool form of art.
What’s your name? Keith Van Pelt, “TF Dutchman.”
Why “TF Dutchman?” I used to just go by “Dutch” and then I figured there’s a lot of Dutch’s out there, it was The Flying Dutchman. I feel like TF Dutchman kind made it sound a little different, it’s like a little tongue-in-cheek almost, it’s kind of silly.
Are you Dutch? I’m Dutch and Irish, born in New Jersey.
What do you do? I do stained glass, primarily, and painting some murals, some carpentry.
How did you get into it? I guess I’ve always been into art and kind of never really thought of it as a lifestyle or a career choice. I was kind of just going through the motions after high school. I only took a year of art in high school and I loved it, but it was just kind of like a fun thing, it wasn’t like I could do this [for a] living. I went to community college for a little bit, I didn’t have a path, didn’t have a drive, it was just kind of felt like what you’d do after high school. And then one day I just stopped in one day to see my art teacher and he mentioned this art school, duCret, this little old Victorian house with a school attached to the back of it. It was a real small school but you could live there, and it wasn’t too far from home. I checked it out and really fell in love with it.
So why stained glass? It’s a dying art isn’t it? So, when I was at school there were all the basic classes and then you had a couple electives. They offered stained glass, and I was kind of like, “That sounds interesting,” and just fell in love with it. Yeah, I feel like it’s coming back a little bit. There was just a big show at the Brooklyn Museum with some really awesome stained glass. There’s people doing it, but it’s definitely not something you’d see people doing every day.
So what about the street art aspect? That was an outlet, I guess. It was something I was always interested in. I grew up in the suburbs, and my friends and I did it a little bit but it was nothing serious. And then I met Clarence, “Loser,” when I was in art school, I was kind of messing around with it. [He] and his brother had been doing it, they grew up in Jersey City, and they were doing graffiti since they were younger. They just started taking me around and I hadn’t been to Jersey City before, and it was just like “Oh, wow,” there’s all these walls that you wouldn’t even know they’re there unless someone took you to them or you like explore and you find them. I was just like a whole new world in front of my eyes.
Do you use the street art to promote yourself as a stained glass artist?
I guess in a way, but I can’t really say that I do graffiti anymore, like maybe very random things here and there—but more murals like at thePep Boys wall or a legal space. I’ve been arrested before and I value my freedom and generally have work to go to in the morning, so getting arrested is not on my plans these days.
Can you explain your murals? I kind of tend to lean towards realism when I paint. So more of my murals will have that kind of aspect to them, but then I like to do graphic work too. Like it depends, like the thing at Pep Boys was more like, we were doing graffiti, so I did a graffiti piece. That’s something that evolves over time with your style and you try to push the bounds here and there. So, yeah I would probably approach that different than a mural, so to speak. With a mural, I do a lot of work before hand, planning it out with the composition and all the elements combining.
People don’t realize how much work doing a mural is right? Yeah, totally. It’s definitely a big investment in time. Some people, like Mustart could just go and do something off the top of his head. Where I’m a lot more planned out and calculated, yeah I definitely envy guys like that who can just let it out. For me it’s more of a process, which I guess goes back to the stained glass, that’s really what attracted me to the art of it at first.
You know, I was in art school, I’m in painting class and drawing class, and its hard to teach someone those skills, [but] there’s definitely things you can teach them that help. Everyone paints in a different way, maybe you’ll emulate your teacher’s style a little bit. I guess if you do work more in your teacher’s style he can help you more, but it’s so open-ended. I could work on a painting forever, it’s almost like if I don’t have a deadline it’s so hard to finish. Where stained glass, I work on my sketch and my layout and then that’s what it is. It’s all worked out ahead of time. Even with my graffiti I approached it more like that, where like Mustart or Clarence will go to the wall and just freestyle off the top of their head. Where like Distort or I sketch a lot beforehand. We’re a little more classically trained where they’re a little more abstract and a little more free flowing.
How long have you been in Jersey City? Eight years.
How do you feel it’s changed in the past couple of years? A lot. So I started coming here with Clarence in probably ’99, 2000. We would go downtown and paint and it was pretty hood still and then I had moved out to Philly and all my friends from high school had moved up here. I was like, “What are you guys doing in Jersey City? Like it’s fucking wild out there. Are you guys on drugs? What’s going on?” And I’d come meet them and then I was like “Ah,” this is like way chiller than I remembered it being. And then I moved up here and then it’s gotten totally even crazier.
Do you have a favorite Jersey City hangout spot? What about food? I like it here, in my house. That’s where you could find me mostly. But I really love the grandma pie at Krispy pizza or the French dip at Hamilton Inn.
Tell me more about your work… So this body of work is my newest, kind of my first real official body of work if you like. And they’re stained glass wrapped canvases, so there’s a canvas underneath and the stained glass frames it. It’s kind of like depending how their lit really changes the look of them a lot, like if they have a spotlight on them, it throws light on to the wall. I can’t say it for a fact that no one has done it before, but it’s something I haven’t seen before.
I kind of just stumbled upon it through a group show with the A-Team, we did a collaborative show two years ago now, in Philly. So there was nine of us all together working on the canvases. We would work on them for a few days and passing them on to the next guy and it was like a big collaboration. I hadn’t painted in a long time, and next to these guys I was going to feel so unpracticed. And I was like I got’ta work my glass into it so a couple of them. So I just kind of put glass pieces on them, then there were these two little canvases where I couldn’t really fit anything on it. So I was like “Why do I need to go on it? Why don’t I just go around it?” and then it was just like a breakthrough moment.
All of the references are photos I’ve taken over the past few years. It’s very, very personal work to me. So it’s friends and the places that I’ve been. That’s Clarence. That’s Mustart. It’s a lot of people I know, kind of like the overlay is more text-based and a little bit of line drawings and patterns. I was trying to combine, I think I was doing a lot of traditional stained glass, like working with newer patterns and themes. [I] was mixing this grandma art with this modern pop.
So you have your work up at Grassroots, is there anything else that you have coming up? We are doing some stained glass classes at Grassroots.
What’s your future plan? Well, I’m looking at some places in Jersey City like to really open up a little storefront, glass shop, start having more classes and just getting more involved in the community. I DJ a little bit around town as TF Dutchman as well.
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