Church from the Damstreet Drawing

VERA WEST (Haarlem, the Netherlands, 1987) My name is Vera West and I'm a Dutch artist living in Haarlem, the Netherlands. My artwork mainly consist of evocative street scenes and observations that I make of people and surroundings. I try to examine and capture the essence of an image. The basis of my paintings are photographic snapshots of everyday situations. I then create a distorted version of these photos until I find my own abstract translation of the image. I consciously play with certain photographic aspects, such as motion blur and overexposure, and often grasp the essence of an image by illuminating a fragment. I like anonymity, abstraction and neutrality in a painting. The images that appeal to me are often completely random. I would purely concentrate on shape, color and composition, yet my paintings are always figurative suggestive and therefore become narrative, which makes the images meaningful and interesting to me. This is an ongoing study in which I continue to discover what ‘language’ in paintings entails and what I can tell by painting.