Many things, one movement. For a long time, I have wondered about the diversity in my work. My paintings can look very different from one another. A bull, a labyrinth, an almost empty canvas, a circle, a Chinese landscape, words, colour, or simply a line. Recently, while looking back through more than thirty years of work, something became clear to me. For me, my work has always been a journey. Each body of work is a different stage of that journey. I explore, I follow a line

When I began this book, I thought I was looking back at forty years of paintings. Instead, I discovered a single journey. The images changed. The materials changed. The subjects changed. But the direction never did. For many years I believed I was moving from one project to another. Now I see that I was quietly following a single thread. A thread I could only recognise by looking back. Looking back, I realise that my work never began with certainty. It never began with a plan

For years I thought I was making paintings. Looking back, I see a different story. The Chinese poems slowly dissolved into calligraphy. The calligraphy dissolved into gesture. Gesture dissolved into fragments. The fragments became hundreds of small cards. The cards slowly transformed into landscapes. Not landscapes of mountains or cities, but landscapes of memory, movement and attention. I photographed those cards, enlarged tiny details and painted them again. With every step

By 2025, something unexpected began to happen. The poems slowly disappeared. Not because I abandoned them, but because I no longer needed to make them visible. In 2024 I had woven poems into my paintings in Russian, Armenian, Sanskrit, Chinese and English. I was fascinated by the beauty of different alphabets and by the way language could become part of the image itself. The poems were no longer written beside the painting; they had become the painting. But my search did not

"Painting is silent poetry. Poetry is blind painting."— Leonardo da Vinci In 2024, words entered my paintings once again. For many years I had been fascinated by Chinese calligraphy. What moved me most was not the meaning of the characters, but their presence. Before they became language, they were movement. Rhythm. Breath. Silence. I often could not read what was written. Yet I could feel it. Slowly I realised that this was also what I wanted my paintings to do. Not to be re

The circle did not remain empty for long. Images began to enter it. Among them was the ox. My fascination with the ox had begun many years earlier. In 2003 I had already worked with the ancient Zen story of the Ten Oxherding Pictures: the search for the ox, the discovery of its traces, the struggle to catch it, and finally the return to the world. The ox was never merely an animal. It represented something elusive. The mind. The self. The thing we search for, even though it h

"The circle has no beginning."— Zen saying In 2023 something unexpected happened. I wasn't searching for a new series.I wasn't trying to reinvent my work.After more than thirty-five years as an artist, I no longer felt the urge to constantly find something new. Instead, something found me. It began with a simple white circle. Not carefully painted.Not geometrically perfect.It appeared almost by accident, created through pressure, movement and chance. A trace rather than an im

“Painting is silent poetry. Poetry is blind painting.”— Leonardo da Vinci In 2023, a new chapter began. For years I had been fascinated by Chinese calligraphy. Not only by the beauty of the characters, but by the attention with which they were written. Every stroke seemed to arise from silence. One afternoon I was invited to lunch with a Chinese family. After the meal, Changan Dong quietly unfolded sheets of rice paper, prepared his ink and brushes, and began his daily practi

For years, China had been present in my life through books, poetry and language. Every morning I wrote Chinese characters by hand.Not because I wanted to master the language,but because I was fascinated by the discipline of repetition. One character.Then another. Day after day. Years passed. Then, unexpectedly, China entered my studio. I met an elderly Chinese calligrapher who had devoted his life to the brush. He practised every single day. Not for an exhibition. Not for rec

After completing The Journey – I Sent You a Thousand Cards, I found myself returning to some of the small paintings. Not to reproduce them,but to discover what happened when a small image was allowed to breathe. A postcard and a large canvas speak different languages. The enlargement was never a copy.It became a new painting. As the scale changed,so did the rhythm. Brushstrokes that had once been quick and intimate became broader and more physical. Space opened. Colour began

After years of travelling,painting hundreds of cards,and learning to listen to the landscape,another beginning quietly announced itself. Not a new subject. A new way of painting. I began covering large canvases with black. Black was never darkness. It was space. A place where every gesture became visible. There was nowhere to hide. For years I had been searching for simplicity.Not simplicity of form,but simplicity of presence. I wanted to know whether a single movementcould c

2019 Around 2019, I became fascinated by reflections. Not by mirrors themselves,but by the uncertainty they create. An object was no longer simply an object.A room became another room.The familiar dissolved into something that could no longer be trusted.Every reflection seemed to reveal another reality, while at the same time concealing it. The first paintings from this period were titled Nothing Is What It Seems to Be. I painted what appeared between the object and its refle

After learning to see the hidden structures of the landscape, I became fascinated by what happens when nature quietly begins to inhabit architecture. While my life slowly found new foundations in Portugal, I bought two small houses—one in Tavira and one in Olhão—which I rented out to make it possible to continue working independently. A year later I found my studio in Olhão and, beside it, the little blue house that would gradually become home. Yet what occupied me most durin

Learning to see "Sometimes a landscape changes you long before you begin to paint it." The mountain gave me everything I had been longing for. Silence. Space. Distance. From my caravan I looked across rolling hills that stretched all the way to the horizon. The light changed from hour to hour. The seasons unfolded slowly. Life became wonderfully uncomplicated. Yet there was one thing I could not ignore. Electricity pylons. They crossed the landscape in every direction. At fir

A Journey into the Invisible Sometimes life changes gradually.Sometimes it changes all at once. By 2016, the Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over our lives for years finally fell. For years we had been involved in a legal battle after our bank had sold us an interest-rate swap. Although we won an injunction against the Rabobank, the victory came at a price. We had only a short time to raise a substantial amount of money. We sold what we could. We hoped to refinance ou

"Looking back, I realise that some of the most important changes happen almost invisibly." There are periods in an artist's life when little seems to happen. No new body of work announces itself. No clear turning point can be identified. Yet, beneath the surface, everything is quietly shifting. Looking back, I realise that these years were not a pause between two chapters. They were the years in which the ground was being prepared. Around 2012, I began studying Mandarin. Ever

A Journey into the Invisible. "Don't tell me. Show me." Some ideas begin as a sketch. Others begin as a conversation. Together with my artist friend Joanneke Meester, I started imagining a series of film performances. We called ourselves MeesterStorteboom. Everything had to happen inside a circle. A circus.Firefighters.Children in a schoolyard.Skaters.People in traditional costume.A fairground.Even the everyday rituals of a department store. At first we thought we were making

By 2011, something had quietly shifted. For many years I had searched for images. Gradually, I found myself searching for something else. I could not yet name it. The line had become independent.It no longer described objects.It revealed relationships. My paintings became quieter.Forms were reduced.Colour was no longer there to imitate the visible world,but to create a space in which the image could breathe. Around that time I discovered The Art of War by Sun Tzu. What fascin

A Journey in Seeing A long-term visual memoir by Tineke Storteboom. Each chapter is published as it is written. Together they form an ongoing book about the development of an artistic practice over nearly four decades. By 2011 the line had quietly taken over. It no longer described objects.It no longer followed form. It began to live a life of its own. I drew networks of ink that spread across paper like roots,rivers,or invisible pathways.Sometimes they became paintings.Somet

A Journey in Seeing A long-term visual memoir by Tineke Storteboom. Each chapter is published as it is written. Together they form an ongoing book about the development of an artistic practice over nearly four decades. I no longer wanted to make images. I wanted to discover how images speak to one another. Fragments from different places and different times began to find each other.Photographs.Japanese prints.Butterflies.Ceramics.Landscapes.People.Memories. The black lines