About me
A passionate soul, an observant eye, a contemplative mind.
Oil Paintings on Wood – Living Skies, Painted in the Moment
Painting has been part of my life since childhood. I was fortunate to receive formal training in drawing, first through private lessons, then at the Academy of Boitsfort and at the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels. Very early on, I felt the need to move away from figurative art and explore a more inward path—one shaped by structure, line, and movement. For many years, I worked almost exclusively with line, as though each mark could open a passage into a new space.
My earliest works were dense, heavily textured, and rich in color. To better understand how this material could truly breathe, I undertook extensive, almost artisanal research into the composition of oil paint: its flexibility, drying time, and the way it can be shaped and manipulated. This approach allowed me to push my experimentation much further.
In the early 2000s, I chose to return to the essentials and reduce my visual language. Black on white, white on black. A radical contrast. This apparent simplicity opened up a new field of exploration: transparency, depth, and that which the eye senses even before it fully perceives it.
Over the past two years, my gaze has turned toward the sky. Clouds gradually imposed themselves, almost despite me. They are at once abstraction and presence, pure movement and fragile form. They provide a space where all my previous research naturally comes together.
What I seek here is a dialogue: between energy and softness, between the density of oil paint and the transparency of air, between what reveals itself and what fades away. The clouds thus become not a subject, but a place—a pictorial space where verticality, movement, and that sense of infinity that always accompanies the sky can meet.
By removing the horizon and working in vertical formats, I invite the viewer to step beyond the traditional landscape and enter a more immersive, less grounded experience. Without a fixed horizon line, there is neither “up” nor “down,” no stable point of view—only the movement of the clouds and the gesture that brings them to life.
This shift creates a feeling of suspension, as though the viewer were inside the atmosphere rather than observing it from a distance. The vertical format enhances this sensation, stretching the pictorial space and allowing the eye to travel through layers of movement, opacity, and transparency. My aim is for the viewer to feel enveloped, immersed in a space that is at once vast and intimate, familiar and elusive.
My work is created using oil paint applied to prepared wooden panels or cotton canvases.
walther adriaensen 