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. "The clay was teaching me something paint could not." After years of painting landscapes that became increasingly quiet, I found myself longing for another kind of silence. I wanted to work with my hands. Not with brushes.Not with colour.Just with earth. Clay s

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. 2006–2007 "The shell must break before the bird can fly."— Alfred Tennyson After years of working on paper and canvas, my hands were drawn to clay. It was not a departure from painting. It was another way of exploring form. There was something deeply restorativ

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. In 2006 I was invited to create a permanent work for the entrance hall of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. Rather than making one monumental painting, I chose to build the work from many small paintings. Each panel could exist on its own. Together they for

2005 After The Odyssey, my work became quieter. Not because I was looking for less, but because I wanted to look more closely. I began painting small landscapes. They were never intended as places.They were not memories of mountains or distant horizons. They were attempts to understand how little was needed before a landscape could begin to exist. One line. One mass. One movement of paint. The paintings became smaller, but the questions became larger. Each work was a variatio

2004–2006 After The Odyssey, the journey continued. But the story disappeared. What remained was the landscape itself. Not as a place in the world, but as a place within. These were years in which my life became smaller in scale. My studio had become a bedroom. When the house finally grew quiet, I painted. With three young children, uninterrupted hours in the studio had become a rarity. The monumental canvases gradually gave way to smaller paintings. Not because my ambitions

2003 After years in which painting had quietly merged with everyday life, it returned with unexpected clarity. In 2003, I was invited to create a series of fourteen paintings for a theatrical interpretation of The Odyssey, based on a text by the Dutch actor and writer Helmert Woudenberg. The paintings were never intended as illustrations of Homer's epic. Instead, they became a landscape through which the story could unfold. During each performance, the audience moved through

1994–2002 There are periods in an artist's life that, in retrospect, seem quieter than they really were. For a long time, I thought these were such years. Looking back, I see something different. Painting was no longer the only place where images appeared. For a brief period, I imagined a future in New York. Then I became pregnant with my first son. The future I had imagined quietly gave way to another one. I designed record covers, created illustrations, developed stage imag

I travelled to Spain intending to continue painting bulls. Instead I found mountains. At first I resisted them. I had come to paint something else. But the mountains slowly began to speak the same language as the animals I had been following. The back of a bull. The curve of a hill. A shoulder. A horizon. They were becoming the same gesture. The bull no longer needed horns. Its body had entered the landscape. Looking back, I think this was the first time I understood that for

The Bull Becomes Landscape There was one small painting I made that I did not understand for many years. Two dark figures stood opposite each other. Between them appeared a red presence. At the time I did not think of it as an important work. It felt more like a note in a sketchbook than a finished painting. Years later I encountered Federico García Lorca's writings on duende. Only then did I recognize what I had been painting. The image was not about two people. It was about

After the body,another presence entered the work. The bull. It did not arrive as an idea. It arrived as a necessity. As a child I had been fascinated by mythology, especially the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The image had never really left me. Deep inside the labyrinth, there was no treasure waiting. There was a creature. Half man. Half bull. For years I had understood the labyrinth as a path toward the center. Only later did another question emerge. What if reaching th

After exploring the landscape of the mind, the figure quietly returned. Not as portrait. Not as anatomy. The body appeared as a vessel, a place where experience settles before it becomes language. The circles that had moved through the previous paintings remained, but they no longer described thoughts.They became spaces within the body, thresholds, silent centers. The figures themselves were unfinished almost anonymous. Identity no longer mattered. Presence did. Looking back,

After the gates, another question emerged. What does the mind look like? Not the face. Not the personality .But the place where thoughts appear before they become words. I had no image to begin with. Instead, I started drawing. Dozens of drawings. Each one explored a slightly different movement. Spirals. Fragments. Floating forms. Small blocks that collided or drifted apart. Some drawings felt quiet others almost turbulent. They were never meant as preparatory sketches alone.

After the labyrinth another image entered the work. Not the path,but the gate. Until then my paintings had been searching for orientation: a movement toward a center that could be sensed but never fully seen. Now the attention shifted. What happens when you arrive? The paintings that followed became layered. Not one image, but several stages within the same work. Forms repeated, changed, disappeared and returned again.A single shape could move through different states as if I

After the series of the ox,the labyrinth appeared on my path. During a visit to Chartres Cathedral, I was immediately drawn to it. Not as a historical object,but as a living form: an image that seemed to recognize something in me. As a child, I had already been fascinated by mythology, by the story of Theseus and Ariadne’s thread leading out of the maze. But in Chartres,this image shifted. The labyrinth no longer revealed itself as a trap, but as a path. A maze is designed to

Between the Cross series and the labyrinths,there was a quieter period of transition. No clear series emerged,only fragments:black-and-white studies,skeletal figures,reduced forms,lines searching for direction. Looking back now, I recognize these works as threshold paintings. The explicit religious imagery slowly disappeared,but the underlying structure remained. The cross dissolved into polarity:black and white,inside and outside,presence and absence,movement and stillness.

After the series Unio Mystica,another image entered the work. Not the circle,but the cross. Around 1991 I became fascinated by the Stations of the Cross found in churches and along old pilgrimage routes.I wanted to understand why this ancient sequence of images had survived for centuries,and what these stages of suffering might reveal beyond religion itself. My search eventually led me to the Kollenberg in the south of the Netherlands,where an old outdoor crossway climbs slow

Around 1990, my work began to change fundamentally. Until then, I had mainly been occupied with image, atmosphere, composition and space. But during travels through Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, another layer slowly opened. The paintings became less about representation and more about inner movement. During this journey I stayed for ten days at the Buddhist monastery Suan Mokh in southern Thailand, under the teachings of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. For ten days we lived almost en

Chapter 5 — Falling Angels From within that space, angels entered the work. I did not choose them; they appeared. In the early years,1988 to 1990, the work moved through different themes: dreams, movement, the body in motion, fragments of text, and ideas drawn from mysticism. I was searching for a language without yet knowing what it was. The angel emerged from that search. Their origin also goes back to a visit to Venice where I saw the amazing ceiling paintings of Titian an

After the still lifes, the work shifted. In my second year at the monumental department, I was asked to paint the fourth dimension. Whatever that meant for me. I learned that it is not a physical space, but an awareness, a sense that reality exceeds what we can see at once. Mysticism entered almost simultaneously. Two simple notions: everything is one, and the one remains unknowable. The first paintings were large and blue. Dense. Overloaded. Everything happening at once: lin

The WORKS, a journey in seeing, chapter 3: 1988 Still Life After Giorgio Morandi My first paintings were still lifes, created as part of an assignment at the academy. Inspired by Morandi, we were asked to construct a composition and paint it. Bottles, bowls, simple objects. Yet I quickly felt that it was not only about the objects themselves. Morandi moved me because his work carried a silence that seemed larger than what was depicted. His bottles and jars were not merely thi