CF11 Painting

Steef van Winkel is a Dutch abstract painter working in a Color Field vocabulary, as well as a musician and technologist. The primary influence of his early representational work came from his uncle Frans van de Ven, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet. In 2020 after more than a decade hiatus from visual arts during which Van Winkel primarily focused on music composition and his career in technology in Dublin and San Francisco, Van Winkel returned to visual arts and abstract painting. With an emphasis on color, repetition, patterns and small gestures, Van Winkel's works bore a clear connection to Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin and other Abstract Expressionists. By 2022, Van Winkel has developed a manner of Color Field painting that is grounded in 20th century art history but is also characteristically his own. His use of primary colors and fluorescent acrylic paint applied with feathered brush strokes develop into colorful floating translucent blocks on saturated backgrounds. He credits Mark Rothko as well as Vivian Springford, Irene Monat Stern and Yvonne Thomas as inspiration for his work. Today, Steef continues to develop his personal journey into mindfulness, balance, self love and discovery of values and priorities, partially as a way to process societal, political, pandemic and personal events of the prior few years.