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JORIS GRAAF, ABSTRACT ARTIST

MASTERS GALLERY highlights weekly art works by prominent artists. Self-taught visual artist Joris Graaf creates tension in his digital photo art, by forming a synthesis of opposites: noise and melody, order and chaos, growth and decay.Online Editor: Larissa Schaule Jullens
Image: Joris Graaf

Nostalgia No. 22

"I've always felt strongly the need to create, but I didn't start actually making art until very late. Until a few years ago, I was still working as a geologist. When people see my artworks for the first time, they often think they are paintings, but they are digital photographic works. When I started photographing about five years ago, I soon noticed that I tended to create abstract images. They were still really abstract photographs then. Later, I started publishing my work on Instagram, and that's where I discovered the world of contemporary abstract painting, and it had a huge influence on my own photographic work. Through double exposure techniques and digital editing, I developed a method of creating work that was inspired by the paintings I discovered online, but did not involve a brush. The work caught on and I was selected by GUP magazine for New Dutch Photography Talent2019 and Fresh Eyes 2019. So my work is photographic in nature because I use a camera to create the source images, but the digital post-processing of these images is just as important as the shooting itself. So I am also not a photographer. I prefer to call myself an abstract artist."

The Intensity of Emotion

"My works rarely have social or political connotations. I am much more concerned with creating atmosphere and evoking emotions. My longest-running series is not called Nostalgia for nothing. Art for me is about feeling. I am driven by my own emotions and intuition. In addition to my own "internal world," I am also strongly inspired by music. I personally find that to be the most powerful art form there is. There is no other art form that manages to evoke such strong feelings in me. That is perhaps why many of my images are square, like record sleeves. I am now also sometimes asked by musicians to provide works for their cover artwork. Or I hear that there are musicians who are inspired by my images. I think that's fantastic. That's something, which I'm immensely proud of. After a period in which I worked with a lot of dark tones, I started to use more and more bright colors and high contrasts in my works. I wanted to make the emotions as intense as possible. This work is very clearly an example of this."

The Chrysalis

"There are times when I doubt my method of working and I think my digital photographic works are not 'real' enough because they are not made by hand, like a painting. But, at other times, I think what I do is actually original and innovative. I sometimes make the comparison with electronic music: where painters create their artworks using "classical instruments," I try to create similar images by digital means. Electronic music often uses so-called samplers, to record sounds from the world around us that are then manipulated and processed into musical compositions. I actually do something similar with visual art: I use my camera to capture pieces of reality, but I then distort them to create new visual compositions. Yet in the late 2020s, I began experimenting with methods to work more with my hands. I began cutting prints of my own work into pieces that I then arranged by hand into new compositions. I then photographed and edited these in turn to get the colors slightly different. The Chrysalis is an example of this and the title (pupation of insects) alludes to the fact that this may be an intermediate form on the way to collage, actually gluing up the paper scraps using glue to create unique works of art."