Waldo van Bokhoven

With the photographs resulting from these explorations, he constructs new landscapes—new vistas and impressions of nature. Sometimes colorful, sometimes subdued. The ‘collected’ material forms the foundation of his ‘paintings’. The new image arises by digitally cutting up the collected photos and blending them layer by layer. They are tied together by a network of black and colored lines, acting like the cement between the layers. This results in new, homogeneous structures—intriguing, layered landscapes and forests that don’t exist in reality but could seemingly be found in nature.

In the series Collected Forests, various photographs of trees have been rearranged to create an entirely new forest. The image of trunks, branches, and leaves is enhanced by drawing lines and patterns over the collage with colored pencil. In the MixedForests series, we see scenes reminiscent of so-called “sottoboscos,” an almost forgotten genre from the 17th century. Forest still lifes, or “forest floors,” in which painters zoomed in on life at the base of the forest. The result is not a realistic depiction of forest vegetation, but a magical world emerging from a typically dark background with literally ground-level representations of nature.

Waldo van Bokhoven studied at the Academy for Art and Design
St. Joost in Breda (1986, cum laude).