Artistic Vision — Contemporary Dutch Female Artist Leonoor Ruigrok

I paint what I feel rather than what is merely visible.

Layer by layer, image by image, I build spaces where tenderness and strength can exist at once. For me, layering takes precedence over clarity, tension over resolution, presence over perfection.

Therefore my work is not about decoration, but about opening toward depth. For me, depth matters more than surface.

If you are looking for my position within the Dutch art landscape, you can read more about why I identify as a woman artist in the Netherlands. Here, I speak about the work itself.

An act of freedom

Freedom is an overarching theme in my work. It allows me to move and dress as I wish, to broaden my perspective and to experiment. It also means being able to explore several series at the same time, rather than following a fixed structure determined in advance. The series I frame therefore leave space around the image, so that space is literally present.

This sense of freedom also shapes what others may experience when encountering my work. I often speak about the sources of my symbolism and the use of narrative compositions. At the same time, my work does not need to explain anything. It may leave room for personal interpretation, for the viewer’s own story. There is an open ending, and that is very important to me.

From this position of freedom, I allow my intuition to become a point of contact with what is happening in society. That is the starting point of all my work. Of course, it is powerful when a painting instinctively captures something of a collective feeling. When that happens, I know the work has done what it needed to do.