Arjen started painting at eight years old. When he was 17 he started to study the violin at the conservatory. After completing his study he was offered a job as principal violin teacher at the same institute. All those years Arjen kept painting in the style of very different masters of art history. Starting as a young boy with copying Rembrandt paintings, moving on to making style copies of Ruysdael, Monet, Picasso, Dali, Tanguy and many others. After the birth of his son, Arjen started sketching and looking for his own style. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic Arjen took the step to transform the sketches he made into colorful paintings. In July 2021 the first interest from the art world for his works emerged. This sparked the interest from collectors and galleries from all over the world. All this interest offers Arjen the possibility to artistically do what he loves the most: to create art that makes you wonder.

“I decided to go back to basics of the drawing and the possibilities of the line. How to be simple and expressive at the same time. With different elements of the human body and geometric forms I construct whole new entities. I try to make balanced and minimalistic works. The deformation in Picasso’s work is a great inspiration to me. I started looking for a simplification and reduction of what he did. A simplification in a way like what Mondrian did in his abstract compositions. 

The way Picasso deforms and at the same time reorganizes the elements so that the result is a balanced picture, is truly amazing. But where Picasso chose to do this in a cubistic way, I went down another alley and tried to get an image that has volumes and feels like a whole entity, a ‘real’ being. 

I work at the intersection of the simple and the absurd. For instance by creating the illusion of body parts that aren’t there, or the possibility that you can interpret one body part as two different ones. Some works have an underlying message, commenting in a subtle way on the world we live in.”