portfolio
I remember Sweden in fragments: snow-covered cottages, quiet winter landscapes, coffee cups, bonefires, and the sweetness of a vaniljbullar.
These paintings are small pieces of a journey shared with friends, now remembered from a distance. Yet the warmth remains.
I paint these moments not to preserve the journey as it was, but to preserve how it felt. The quietness, the coziness, the fleeting beauty of being somewhere cold and finding warmth.
These paintings are about memory, loss, and choosing what to keep.
A collection of small warmths, gathered from the cold.
Every year, I paint a self-portrait. These paintings are not only portraits of how I look, but reflections of how I feel at that particular moment in my life. Through colour, expression, and brushwork, emotions such as joy, uncertainty, calm, or sadness can become visible.
Sometimes the painting captures something much simpler: a favourite sweater, a certain look, or a small detail that reminds me of who I was that year.
Together, these self-portraits become a visual diary.
My name is Aafke. I am a twenty-eight-year-old painter from the north of the Netherlands. A land where the horizon stretches endlessly and the sky always seems larger than life.
For many years, my world was made of ice, asphalt, and velocity. I devoted myself to short track, longtrack speed skating, and cycling, chasing dreams that never became reality. My career was brief, but it was luminous. It shaped my discipline, my resilience, my way of moving through the world.
In 2022, I chose to step away. Retirement sounds heavy for someone so young, but to me it felt like opening a door rather than closing one. For as long as I can remember, another dream had been waiting patiently in the background: quieter, slower, but persistent: to become an artist.
Not long after I left the world of competition, I fulfilled another long-held wish. I bought a VW Transporter and transformed it with help of my brother into a small home on wheels. Wood, fabric, paint, and imagination turned it into something intimate and alive. It is not just a vehicle; it is a moving studio that I can plant wherever I go.
Now I travel through Europe with my dog, Joppe, beside me. We are not yet on the road full-time (though that remains my quiet ambition) but whenever we can, we go. Joppe curls up beside the easel while I work, occasionally lifting his head when the wind shifts or a bird passes overhead.
The landscapes I encounter have become the heart of my art. Nature feels honest to me and in oil paint I try to capture not only what I see, but also the memory it has given me.
I paint scenes. I paint people. I paint moments. Not as exact replicas of reality, but as nostalgic echoes. Paintings that feel like remembering something you didn’t know you would miss.
Where sport once taught me how to move swiftly, painting has taught me how to stand still. To observe.
This is the life I am building: one road, one canvas, one moment at a time.
Welcome on my journey!
