About Magda

I was born in 1959 in Delft. After grammar school I finished at the academy for Physical Education in Amsterdam. During the 8 years following, I specialised as a Jazzdance teacher and performing dancer.

In time I discovered that expression limited to dancing wasn't satisfying. In 1991 I decided to enlist at the Academy of Arts to develop painting as an extra medium of expresssion. With much enjoyment I finished the study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Painting and dancing apeared to fuse as a result. Expression and movement got a special intimacy because of this.

I focus on my closest surroundings. I paint my children and other children with the same love. The way they move, their skin, eyes, emotions, their absolute uniqueness, it absorbs me beyond measure.

My way of painting is experimental. In the sense that a portrait can be realistic one time, the other time it's an atmosphere that vanishes in the canvas of the painting, yet it's crisply clear which specific child is depicted.

A painting emerges slowly, layer over layer. The atmosphere about a person, the expression in the eyes. The likeness becomes striking and at a certain moment, it's the person becoming real on the painting. As if touchable yet elusive, cast in a personal atmosphere, in stillness on the canvas. The paintings have a special radiation. I make visible what is present, sometimes hidden deep. Because of my mastery I play with the material realism of the 17th century, the lively touch of the expressionsts or the etherial rendering of the impressionists. I don't need to make up. I only have to look carefully and devote my intuition and mastery as an artpainter, to show the beauty and splendour that is in everyone of us. I show reality and at the same time the influence of the ungraspable, allways changing influences of light, time, thoughts, movement and emotion.

A client once told about a painting she commisioned about her mother: "If I look at the painting via the mirror, I see what she was like as an old woman. If I look directly at the painting, I see the young woman as she is represented in the picture.

Click here for my carreer brief

My way of painting is
experimental. In the sense
that a portrait can be
realistic one time, the other
time it's an atmosphere
that vanishes in the canvas
of the painting, yet it's
crisply clear which specific
child is depicted.