Artist Abroad

I hate saying goodbye but I did it anyway 🥲 Living as an ex-pat I paint places I miss and help you reconnect to the beauty of the world. 1⃣ I was born in Amsterdam 2⃣ I have lived in Fort Worth, TX, USA, Montréal, Canada and Nagoya, Japan 3⃣ I love playing board games 4⃣ I obsessively take photographs everywhere I go 5⃣ I use my photographs to create urban, hand-layered, mixed media paintings If you would have told 16-year-old me that she would leave not just her home, but her country, to go live in countries like Japan, America and Canada, she wouldn’t have believed you. But at 28 years old that same girl cried her eyes out as she said goodbye to her moms, before boarding a plane to join her husband in Fort Worth Texas. Stepping away from everything familiar presented the unique opportunity to reinvent myself as a person, and it gave me time to explore the kind of artist I wanted to be. Whenever I go somewhere I have an almost obsessive urge to photograph every inch of that place, just so I can hold onto it when I inevitably have to say goodbye. This obsession, combined with our newfound opportunity to travel the world, lead me to the photo-based mixed media paintings I create now. My frequent travels allow my ongoing body of work; ‘Traveling the World’ to grow and evolve as I explore and add new destinations. A recent stint of living in Japan inspired a deep dive into Japanese arts and aesthetics, which resulted in my new series; ‘World on Washi’. As I continue to travel and experience the world, I will keep on growing and evolving as an artist and as a person. My vision: Through the universal language of art, I aim to bridge cultural and language barriers, to make the world into a place where all people feel connected to one another.