(saw whirring) - There's probably some lump somewhere in my gray mass where it says when I get up in the morning, "Paint", because that's all I've ever done.

(brush splashes) Basically, it's sort of a portrait of my long gone dad.

I set it up like a work table and it used to have these textiles because he usually used to work for these textile companies and designed fabrics for them, those Indonesian fabrics.

So it has a sarong on it.

I did watercolors, very much like I do so I painted a pieces of stretch watercolor paper on it.

And on top of that, is one of the preliminary studies for a Bible illustration, which I have.

(pensive music) - [Jessica] Recently, Henk Pander was one of four artists selected for a public art commission that had him going on ride-alongs with the fire department.

- So when there's an accident or some sick person or a fire or whatever and the circumstances allow it, I stand in the corner and I take one of these pencils outta my pocket, open up the sketchbook like this, and just start drawing the scene.

Whatever it is.

(pensive music continues) These drawings have to happen really immediate, very fast, very spontaneous.

Oftentimes, when there's great chaos and people are running around and people standing in front of me.

The very first call I went on, we went to this little house in east Portland and ran up the stairs and I just sort of followed them.

I was wearing sort of a dark shirt also, and I was sort of camouflaged a little bit.

I carried my backpack and so walked into this sort of room with sort of messy and chaotic and there was a kid out there and some man.

And right in the middle of the floor was this nude man lying there and for all I knew he was dead.

And there was piece of bed sticking out there, and I put my sketchbook on this piece of bed and started drawing.

(brush splashing) (brush shuffling) They all wear rubber gloves so there's all these white hands or blue hands or purple hands.

Oftentimes, these guys are really big.

They're all sorta indigo in their dark suits and so there has this sort of color element to it, sorta has this great contrast.

Oftentimes, there's these these extremely frail people.

And there's big men, you know.

And there's the big ladders on it.

They all reach out into this setting, and the setting is powerful and sad and gripping, and there's all these white hands reaching out to help and at the same time having this barrier.

So they touch, but they don't really touch, because there is this barrier.

And that makes it also sort of ironic and partly there and partly not there.

(pensive music continues) These images are contemporary images but they have this sort of classical timeless aspect to it, which you will see in paintings throughout the history of art.

- [Jessica inaudible] And that's them trying to revive her.

- I can go back and refer to this scene in my journal and there is a really fairly sharp sort of visual description of what actually took place, what the call was, what it looked like, how the color was, how the light fell on it, the intrigue behind it.

I looked at the dead woman, Cynthia was her name, and took off my cap.

She looked too young, too poor, too sad, lying there with her breast exposed, her yellow bloated belly, the white tag on her chest, the green mouthpiece, the white tape on her forehead, her eyes closed now, motionless on the grimy brown carpet.

These drawings, you can stare sort of meditative.

You can sit with a drawing like this and for a long time, just go through each little part and give it form.

When I make these drawings, I also have in the back of my mind, maybe eventually it'd be a painting but I don't commit myself to any kind of color or anything but just sort of, I'll work myself through all these various details of what a drawing or what a painting like that would look like.

As I do that, it gets further and further removed from the real moment out there and it becomes really, there's much more of this metaphor about the human condition and people actually trying to help each other.

- What's the dimension on this one?

- [Jessica] One of Pander's sons Jacob Pander, also an artist, recently made a documentary film about his father.

It began as a chronicle of creating a still life.

- What I'd started doing is just kind of looking for a particular painting that might be an interesting painting that might have a kind of a universal quality to it to decide to document.

- [Jessica] Soon, the film titled, "Painted Life", evolved into much more.

- Finally, I was like, "Well, maybe we should sit down and do an interview and start talking about this process."

And as we got into talking about it, it really led back to his father and his relationship with his father and his experience growing up and painting the landscape in Holland.

So that just kind of opened up a whole another level to the film, which I wasn't really expecting.

(pensive music) - It's object in there has some kind of meaning to me.

Not only that, it's sort of my world.

And this is my world, this is my studio, this is my family, this is my heritage.

These are things I own, and these are the things, even though they may have no meaning to somebody else, an old book, a broken piece of pottery or whatever, but it has deep meaning to me.

And I give things, which try to give things which seem apparently meaningless, seem ruined, or broken pieces, or dying people, or things which are like dispensable in a way.

Whether it's an old, poor junkie who's basically gonna be burnt or it is something which have no value.

At least for the moment, or even some old skeleton coming out of the desert and I suspend a skeleton from the ceiling and there it's maybe awkwardly, maybe terrifyingly, but there it walks once and maybe it lives once more and give something which just sort of decays and all that.

Just some meaning, some sort of purpose by making a painting out of it.

(pensive music fades)