River swallow Print

Artist statement: In her work, Elise Klinkert (1967) examines her inextricable connection with nature on the one hand, and can lose herself with love and care in depicting the landscape, nature and the elements. On the other hand, she investigates how this all-overwhelming nature seems to be lost at the hands of man. Her paintings arise from a combination of different aspects: engagement, conversations, source research, a childhood memory or fragments of a dream. The people and animals that Elise paints are time travelers who try to evoke a feeling, a romantic longing for a better world, a life in connection and harmony, with each other and the universe. Her work asks questions about our society and the economic system that has grown out of all proportion, the loss of our interconnectedness, it asks questions about valuable and worthless. Elise wants to create a greater awareness around the vulnerability and preciousness of the surrounding environment. More info : Bio: Elise Klinkert is a Dutch painter who works and lives in the Netherlands. Her paintings are human and animal centred, sometimes combined with landscape. Her work is poetic. She creates magic realistic paintings, with a refined use of colour and composition. Elise was born in 1967 in a small town in the North of Holland. She attended school in Groningen, loved horses and spent all of her free time horseback riding. Art was not part of her education. After a couple of years in her first job, she decided to leave Holland and seek adventure. Starting in Belgium, then came Turkey, Greece, England, Scotland, Germany, and finally South Africa. During these years of exploring she picked tomatoes, became a model and ran her own water sport business. While working as a model in Cape Town she met a stylist, who pulled up in a white van in a burst of energy and fierce creativity. This was the change she had been looking for. So in another radical turn, at 29 she left South Africa and returned home to start her new career as a stylist. Within months she landed her first big assignment for an international company. Now, 20 years later, she looks back on a successful career in styling, and photography. A skill that she picked up along the way, which gave her more freedom to create her own work. This continued pursuit of freedom in 2014 lead to the realisation of a life-long dream: she starts painting! With little material knowledge, she first resorts to taking lessons.