About

Exploring the geometry of joy

My work is a celebration of the bold, the eccentric, and the loudness of being alive. I create art that celebrates the joy of being seen. My style is the rhythmic dance between structured geometry and organic, “funky” forms brought to life with pencil, pastel and paint.

Before I picked up a pencil, I was trying to untangle the world with words and numbers. I studied anthropology because I wanted to understand how people, systems and meaning fit together. Then I spent years turning research into something people could actually read: reports, structures, data made visible.

Somewhere in that work, I kept noticing the same thing: a pattern only becomes meaningful once you can see its shape. The ways in which you can visualize data and create a tangible story out of abstract datapoints, directly inspired my first work. I never sat down to “become” a different kind of creator. I just changed my materials, from spreadsheets and reports to pencil, pastel and paint, and kept asking the same question: what shape does this pattern want to take? The geometry in my work is the same structuring instinct I used for years to make complexity legible. Now I use it in service of something I can’t reduce to a report: joy, the feeling of being alive and interconnectedness.

The process I follow is mostly intuitive. I let the patterns and shapes form themselves after I draw the first line. I follow the line, then give it color, trusting what appears along the way. Nowadays I find inspiration through repetition, movement and the patterns I find in nature. In art I explore and experiment: one line at a time.

Larissa van Es – Lave Art