Corinne Bekker

Welcome to my website.

My name is Corinne Bekker. I live in Utrecht,  the Netherlands, with my  life partner and my son.

I draw and paint. And I make monoprints and mixed media work.

I love to draw and paint portraits. I will circle through my subjects moving from portraits to animals to other subjects and back to portraits.

I started focusing on portraiture in 2018. My materials of choice are charcoal, acrylic and oil paint.  I also love to make monoprints and collages and their subjects may differ from portraiture - from abstract to animals to still life.

I also find inspiration in other things:

• drawing the ordinary objects around my house;
• drawing and painting birds;
• learning new techniques from other artists.

On this website I present my monoprints, small collages and portraits.

The series of small bird paintings was started in early 2022. When these started selling I started this website in English - in parallel with the Dutch one. The intention is to make 100 small paintings of birds.

Life before art

I didn’t always make art. I started my working life as a philosophy student – in fact as a working student, teaching classes as well as going through my studies. I wrote a phD on feminist political philosophy. Ever since I’ve been interested in gender and diversity and at first this was a theoretical subject for me. Ever since I started painting this affected my choice of portrait subjects.

After my time at the university I worked as a freelance writer/editor and fundraising advisor for years.

Life with art

Drawing and painting came back into my life around the time I had a son growing up. From 2011 I started drawing and painting more often, taking classes from an artist living nearby. Online classes changed my world - I could learn from people from all over the world! The time I spent on making art grew and grew.

Early 2017 I decided to teach drawing (under the name Corinnemaakt) and in 2018 I started to focus on making portraits. From 2017 I had a small studio and could experiment with different materials and sizes of my art projects.

Life can get in the way though. The pandemic and government driven lockdowns put a hold on all that. It drove me back home and had me make small art works. I took to making collages of colorprints. And I made a series of monoprints using natural materials like leaves and grass.

Does size matter?

In 2022 I was working on a series of small paintings of birds. As some of these were presented in an international online auction - I finally turned to making an English version of my site. At first it showed mostly small pieces like the one here  (it's postcard size). As my focus changes again (portraits and other animals), size may change as well.

I hope you find some enjoyment in my art work. Please let me know what you think about it!