Dick van Dijk is a passionate artist with an expressive style. His work consists of a dynamic interplay of human forms, existing within the abstract, through which he explores themes of proximity and intimacy. Dick compares the process of painting to collage: assembling, adapting, de-constructing and reconstructing. This creates fleeting moments of embrace, touch and other of sensory experiences, full of incident and surprise. Through painterly discoveries during the working process, he keeps adding new elements and dynamics. The results are layered images of freedom and surrender, close to the skin and seen through the lens of memory and expectation.

As a recurring motif, he paints group portraits with figures standing (…lying/hanging…) so close together that their shapes seem to merge, with blurred contours and overlapping limbs, in loose brushstrokes and subtle tonal shifts, making it difficult to determine where one figure ends and another begins. But that ambiguity is precisely the point, symbolic of the way proximity can cause you to lose track of whose body belongs to whom, where the self and the other become intertwined. Most of these works start relatively simple and restrained with one central figure, but soon figures are added, changed or removed. With expressive brushstrokes, he blends reality and imagination into dynamic layered compositions.

In addition to these group portraits, Dick also paints individual portraits with faces that have been ‘sculpted’ until they feel alive, animated and powerful. Layers of paint leave traces of what came before - remnants of earlier decisions that make the final image richer. By deliberately disrupting the clarity of a portrait, Dick introduces distance, a visual barrier that makes the subject feel both close and slightly out of reach.

Artistic Influences

Dick draws inspiration from renowned painters such as Peter Doig, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas, and El Greco. He also deeply admires the work of Michaël Borremans, Francis Bacon, and Luc Tuymans, whose artistic approaches resonate with his own exploration of form, gesture, and the human condition.

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Oil painting