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I saw a couple of Kees Goudzwaard’s paintings a few years ago and absolutely loved them. The Dutch artist who lives and works in Belgium, creates oil paintings that look like taped pieces of paper, but in fact are smooth surfaced paintings of taped pieces of paper. Not only is the trickery of it all fun, but the paintings themselves are beautiful. The seemingly overlapping layers are so skillfully reproduced – with subtle differences in color recreating the translucency of the layers – that you can’t help but stare in disbelief. The result: a lovely (and surprising) combination of abstract and realistic painting with a textural quality conveyed on a smooth canvas. Here’s a bit on his process:

Kees Goudzwaard commences by creating a collage of cut-out square and rectangular pieces of coloured paper, acetate and transparent foil, which he composes in more or less regular grids by fixing them with paper masking-tape. This process is slow and complex, and develops gradually as it implies numerous decisions and a lot of looking and waiting until the artist finds he has achieved the desired composition and atmosphere. At this point Kees Goudzwaard decides he can paint his original collage, meticulously reproducing it on canvas at a scale of 1:1, thus transforming the creative act of painting into a time-consuming work of transposition.

In case you didn’t notice, I’m a fan.

You can see many more of Kees Goudzwaard’s paintings on his website.