Studio reflections on freedom, symbols and voice

This article is part of my broader artist vision.
You can read the full positioning here → Contemporary Dutch Female Artist.

For a long time, I worked without naming the space I was in. Somewhere along the way, the words began to follow the work, not the other way around.

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NO LABEL, but…

Giving stories – freedom needed

What happens in the studio has always come first. The words followed later, when the work itself began to ask for clarity. Not as definitions, but as traces of how I feel and how I look. I am constantly exploring, moving through countless small trials that quietly clear the way for what wants to be said.

Intuition leads. Freedom is not a luxury in this process, it is a condition. While working, I keep sensing who I am in relation to the world around me. In my paintings and objects, just like in that world, the gentle meets the raw, the quiet touches the expressive. Layer by layer, the image grows, symbolic, narrative, sometimes hesitant, sometimes bold.

What begins as something deeply personal slowly opens outward. A story takes shape, not to explain, but to invite. And when that story finds its way into someone else’s experience, becoming something of their own, that is where the work truly starts to breathe.

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Preferably in solitude, the stories and research travel with me into the studio, or are born right there. Symbolic figures surface without announcement; fragments of nature and inner landscapes push their way in. Soft pink collides with a rough layer, a figure carries something it cannot yet name. What appears tender at first often holds, under the skin, resistance, drive, and a force that refuses to stay still.

personal Symbols in the mix

Symbols don’t show up on request. They slip in when the work allows it, sometimes only after resistance. A house standing in heavy weather, a female figure holding conflicting states, a mark that refuses control. These are not ornaments. They carry weight.

See available works in my portfolio.

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I’m drawn to the edge where things don’t quite settle. Soft pressed against raw, quiet brushing up against the expressive. That friction keeps the work alive. It opens a narrow space where imagination and reality lean into each other, without needing to merge.

The freedom I was given — and the freedom I dared to take — meant everything. It is still something I wrestle with. That familiar pause before committing a mark: what if this is misunderstood, what if it asks too much, what if it reveals more than intended. Each time, I step through it anyway.

Over time, practice itself became the place where freedom could exist. Not as an idea, but as a condition. Each canvas turned into a testing ground for transformation, resilience, and the ongoing effort to let the work breathe on its own terms, without forcing resolution.

Working this way also means moving within a tradition while resisting its weight. I carry techniques and histories with me, but I don’t settle into them. Instead, I keep searching for a voice that stays fluid, weaving symbolic and expressive elements that appear, fade, and return across different bodies of work — only revealing their meaning after the fact.

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“I paint what I feel – not to explain, but to open.” – Leonoor Ruigrok

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Symbols Hare and Deer

power players with human capacity

Years ago, I began sketching female figures accompanied by a hare — Drasper the Hare, from the bedtime fables my father told near the dunes where I grew up. Clever, resourceful, stubborn in the best way. Those stories lingered longer than I realised.

Much later, they resurfaced. Women carrying small hare figures. The hare shifting from fragile to resilient, from alert to defiant. And then the deer appeared — taller, steadier, standing its ground. Not as an answer, but as a presence.

up-popping symbols

These animals are never chosen. They arrive while I work, without announcement. Only afterward do I begin to recognize what they are holding. I don’t use them to explain anything. I let them surface, move through the work, and leave their trace — open, unfinished, asking to be met rather than understood. Read here more about my symbols and narrative >.

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Magical Realism:

blur the boundary

Sometimes the image slips away from what I see and settles closer to what I feel. A figure becomes slightly untethered, a landscape shifts, a gesture carries more weight than its form. I don’t try to correct that movement. I follow it. Somewhere in that blur, the work begins to open, not to explain anything, but to make room.

For a long time, I resisted words like these. Over time, they began to feel less like a label and more like a quiet agreement with myself, a way to stay alert. To keep exploring, experimenting, and staying close to what moves beneath the surface.

I work with symbolism, storytelling, traces of old techniques, guided by both knowledge and intuition. Some days it flows. Other days I wrestle my way through. Both belong to the process. When things get stuck, I return to the studio, that’s where the questions loosen again. More on that later.

Woman painter pride

There is pride in feeling part of something larger, even while working almost entirely in solitude. Not as a position, but as a quiet awareness, that my work does not stand alone. It moves alongside other voices, other hands, each finding their own way of opening stories rather than closing them.

In my work, I’m not interested in full stops. I’m drawn to openings, spaces where imagination and reality brush against each other, where tenderness and strength can exist at the same time. And if a hare or a deer wanders in along the way, unannounced, that feels right.

If I use these words now, it’s not to fix anything in place. It’s to stay in motion. To remain close to the work, and to whatever still wants to surface.

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Where this story connects

• Artist vision
• Read my biography and background
• Press
• Portfolio Leonoor Ruigrok
• Buy my art

Read more about magical realism in painting