Welcome to my website!

Welcome to my website! In my first blog I want to tell a bit about myself. My name is Nieke Nouws and I’m from Roosendaal in the Netherlands. I currently study at the AKI art academy in Enschede. I think I was 3 or 4 years old when I first heard of the term artist and I’ve wanted to become one ever since. Going to an art academy was my dream since I discovered a place like that existed so being where I am right now really is a dream come true.

Since I started with art at such a young age, I’ve gone through almost all the stages of interests. I wanted to draw realistically, and when I couldn’t do this the way I wanted I completely discarded it and drew a lot of fantasy creatures. I was inspired by Allen Williams when I was around 12 years old, and he really influenced me during this phase of interest. I also really liked to draw portraits and when I was around 14 years old I drew a lot of portraits with pen on paper placemats in restaurants. Mostly fan art, I was very into tv shows and emo music at the time. When I learned more about art history in high school I became really interested in Modern art, especially expressionism and surrealism at the time. I also learned a lot about videography during one of the assignments I got at high school. Towards the end of high school, I was more interested in suprematism and dadaism. My end project was an animation of a personal story, made visual in shapes of ecoline.

When I arrived at the art academy in 2019, I got more and more interested in analogue photography. In the introduction week at the AKI I followed the pinhole workshop and I learned a lot about the essentials of photographing. We also learned about how to work in a dark room, how to develop rolls of film and how to print pictures on photo paper. In the second year, I took a lot of time to develop my skills in analogue photography. The first half of the year I spent learning about pinhole photography and in the second half I photographed a lot with a regular analogue camera.

Photography and videography are currently my main interests, but I’m also interested in materials and sculptures. I really enjoy working with my hands, bending material in the way that I have in my head and putting it into space. I want to work more with for example wood and metal, but also ceramics. Another thing that I want to do more in the future is working in the graphic workshop at school and learning more about print making.

I hope this blog explained more about my history of interests and why I chose particular techniques to focus on. But mostly I hope this was fun to read! Enjoy the rest of my website and I’ll see you in the next blog! 🙂

_{15 August 2021}