(Video available below.)
I am drawn to artworks that reward attention — pieces that reveal increasing complexity the more time you invest.
I am also especially interested in how a viewer is encouraged to approach a work and explore it, and how that effort is acknowledged by the work itself. Was you coming from the other end of the hall worth it? Do you now see anything new?
To me, distance and scale are opportunities for expression. The most compelling works change as you move. The experiences offered with each couple of new steps are distinct and stimulating. This is why I build surfaces that invite a closer journey — intricate, dense and alive with detail.
In parallel, the concepts behind my work are rooted in reflection, introspection and open-ended discussion. I want the painting to captivate you instantly, but also to offer enough visual substance to hold you there. Ideally, a viewing should last long enough for your own original thoughts to unfold. Curiosity should ignite spontaneously, and satisfying it should lead you to deeper insights. If that happens, I feel that my work has achieved its purpose.
In the surface detailing stage of my process, the composition of the painting is already established and I am using it as a guideline to create the next layer: a complex field of lines warping around the color and form of my subjects. Leaves, petals, and breathing spaces become interesting and lively when there is more to zoom into.
My linework is loosely inspired by the brushstrokes of impressionism, but deliberately strays from traditional painterly blending. Rather than merging colors by mixing I work with a pre-developed palette and apply colors as distinct unmixed marks. A stroke is decisive and direct and once made it is no longer revisited. This immediacy and finality of the application feels liberating to me.
The lines take on the appearance of gestures made with fast-drying contemporary tools such as acrylic markers or extra-thick gel pens. The lines feel juicy, matte and almost candy-like in their solidity. I make between 120 and 150 thousand individual gestures for a single painting.
I also draw on the optical color-mixing techniques associated with pointillism. A purple flower is not really purple up close — it emerges from the interspersing of navy, teal, orange and bubblegum pink. It visually blends into a purple only at a distance. The human eye construes something beautiful regardless if it is physically there.
The network of marks created in this stage of my process becomes one of the several layers I use to ultimately construct the artwork.
See a timelapse from this stage in the short video above.
Paola's Garden - Partial Timelapse. Step 4/8 from my post-digital process.
This video reveals a stage from the middle of my artistic process. Although it sits midway through the seed-development workflow, this is actually the first true painting stage after creating the seed itself.
Coming just after composition and planning, this is the phase where I block in the major color masses and sculpt out the flowers according to the colors, shapes, and negative spaces established by the seed.
At the end of this stage the image has already emerged but there is no surface detail yet — nothing to look at when you get really close. The result is the painting’s middle layer — a space where the image begins to surface, but has not yet fully resolved.
Janine's Garden - Full view to details and back.
Both conceptually and visually, my paintings are about shifting perspectives — the insights we uncover when we look at something from a different position. My work can be enjoyed vertically as well as horizontally and each orientation offers a different emotional reading. The perception of focal point, depth and free space may also change, thus varying the narrative.
My visual language explores the theme of growth. At very close range, the painting consists of a dense network of strokes that lets the eye explore in a Brownian-like motion. This viewing distance symbolizes childhood: a stage in which vast amounts of input enter the mind but nothing forms a specific shape yet.
At a medium viewing distance, the painting reveals a triangular grid — an almost crystalline structure. This corresponds to late childhood and adolescence where we begin to grasp some of the underlying patterns of life. From the furthest distance, the flowers and plants become most prominent. This is adulthood: the moment when the image coheres into something larger and more meaningful than its building blocks.
Moving back and forth in front of one of my paintings becomes a literal journey through space and a metaphorical journey through time.