Bio

 

I am Thamar van Strij de Regt (1981, The Hague). Officially I started painting two years ago, however I have been painting and drawing on and off since my early childhood. I am a big art fanatic and have absorbed a great deal of artwork, which means that I can draw from a lot of sources. Searching for my own voice I started making small drawings and sketches, which in turn expanded to works on big canvasses. I mainly paint abstract flowers using a custom technique, which entails the thinning out of the acrylic paint, removing excess paint and water and building the painting layer by layer. This gives the paintings a weathered look about them, as if they’ve lived a whole life already. Besides this I also like to do portraits and a whole range of other drawing and painting styles and subjects. I like open spaces, faded and weathered textures and colour combinations that stir up the imagination. My works primarily have an Asiatic theme and sometimes can remind one of batik fabric, something that could be traced to my own Indo-European heritage. I often work on an unprepared canvas to get an even more fluid aquarelle effect. The flowers are painted intuitively and as my process continues they seem to be becoming more and more abstract. I am of the opinion that art is a living and breathing object, meaning that I embrace the imperfections and transitory aspects of the material rather than minimize or eliminate these. This shows for example in that sometimes canvases are reused, meaning that a finished painting will have another separate finished painting on the back.