Currently graduating from the Frank Mohr Institute.
Feel free to get in touch — more work coming soon
I often describe myself as a painter who wanted to be a poet. My practice moves between language, image, and space, guided by an interest in thresholds: between surface and depth, looking and being looked at, presence and disappearance. Painting, for me, is not simply a visual event but a site where attention, material, and atmosphere meet.
Over the past year, I have begun to understand that the core of my practice is not the in-between itself, but its capacity to breathe. I am currently graduating from the Frank Mohr Institute, where my thesis focuses on the notion of the ‘breathing of an image’- a concept that connects painting, perception, and poetic thinking. Breathing describes the space between inside and outside, between the seen and the withdrawn, and between the object and the viewer. It offers a way of understanding how images open, tremble, resonate, and return to stillness.
I work primarily with oil paint on canvas. My fascination with material has led me to learn how to prepare pigments, oils, and grounds myself. Through this, I have come to understand layering, transparency, and surface tension not as techniques, but as forms of attention. The painting becomes a place where air circulates, through paint, but also through silence, pauses, and the distance between myself and the image. Increasingly, I experience my studio as a site of research, where the work unfolds through doing, observing, and withholding rather than through direct illustration.
Theoretical and literary influences support this exploration in different ways. Writers such as Merleau-Ponty, Didi-Huberman offer language for the unstable and alive qualities of images, while poetry remains essential to how I think about fragmentation, resonance, and disappearance. The question is not how to depict breath, but how the painting can become a site where breathing happens.
Ultimately, I see painting as a form of thinking, a slow and attentive process in which the image gains a kind of objectness, not as something inert but as something that vibrates, responds, and asks to be met. I am interested in how paintings can hold life not through representation but through permeability, tension, and tenderness; how they breathe, and how they ask us to breathe with them.
Lambertine van Veldhuizen
Currently based in Groningen, NL
lambertinevanveldhuizen@gmail.com
(+31)642843295