19 Aug 2025

exhibition: elementair

On Friday September 5th, the exhibition Elementair opens at Ontwerpfabriekje in Hilversum.

Next to several recent bird prints, works from the new Street Spirits series will be on display as well. These prints are made with materials found on the street. Brought together in various combinations, these discarded forms are brought back to life.

Programme

  • Opening on Friday, September 5th, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
  • Sunday, September 14th, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM: Presentation on the bird prints and the Hilversum Method for LEGO Letterpress
  • Sunday, September 28th, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM: Monoprinting workshop, printing with found materials
  • Sunday, October 19th, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM: Finissage.

You are cordially invited to attend the opening on Friday, September 5. For more information or viewings at other times, please contact us.

14 Aug 2025

Bearded Tit

brown bird with a long tail, seen from the side, facing left. Light gray head with a black vertical mark under its eye.

New print! The very sophisticated Bearded Tit, the acrobat in the reeds. Its tail too long to fit in the format of the 50 birds series. So not then, but now. As you can see, Bearded Tit is a fitting name as it clearly has a moustache…

Special offer: free worldwide shipping on the first 10 prints. You can order online here.
Stacked lego plates with a gray dot on each to indicate the order of printing.

Its wing was the complex bit this time. I wanted to show those partially overlapping wingtips. Getting those right, and the colour pattern there, required quite a few studies. And so this time I ended up with twelve separate print runs.

Dimensions: 17 x 24 cm, edition: 35 prints. Price: €125,-. Order yours here.

04 Jun 2025

Common Kestrel

Falco Tinnunculus / Common Kestrel / Turmfalke / Faucon crécerelle

Stylized image of a kestrel, printed on gray paper. The bird sits with its back to us, looking to the left. The head is gray with light cheeks and a slightly darker stripe below the eye. The back is reddish brown with black spots. The wingtips are black, tapering to a point and just crossing over the gray tail, which also ends in black.

The Common Kestrel is the Dutch bird of the year 2025. It still is one of the most frequently seen birds of prey in the Netherlands. But even the kestrel is finding it increasingly difficult to survive in a depleting landscape.

Two small and simple pen sketches of hovering kestrels.

The kestrel is a mouse-eater par excellence. Its hunting method is its hallmark: some ten or fifteen meters above the ground, hovering in the air (in Dutch: praying), searching for prey.

Birds of prey have been my favorite birds from childhood. That fierce, built-in scowl, the mighty bright yellow talons, that almost armor-like yellow patch around the nostril (called cera, I just looked it up). And just imagine their view on things. High in the sky, slowly circling and gliding on wings of, important fact, a certain wingspan.

And so, birds of prey in LEGO letterpress had been on the wish list for some time already. There’s an early buzzard in the 50 Birds series, a hawk, and a little owl, but the focus there was primarily on the smaller songbirds. Those were simply better suited to the small format.

As characteristic as that mid-air hovering may be, I couldn’t quite manage to depict the kestrel in that pose! The wings are at odd angles, viewed from a very foreshortened perspective, and with the less intensely colored undersides visible. Difficult.

Detail photo of the print with focus on the pattern on the back.

No, much better to show it in such a way that highlights the pattern of black spots on the male’s reddish-brown back. (The female is really beautiful too!)

Een abstract patroon van kleine cirkels met daaronder kwart-cirkels met de punt naar boven gericht.

That motif for those black spots became a printing form that itself yielded an interesting graphic image. So I printed it several times as a standalone print.

The Common Kestrel print

Prent van de torenvalk op zo goed als wit papier

The print was made using eleven printing runs.

I printed two editions:

  • 25 copies on white, 638-gram Saunders Waterford paper
  • 25 copies on warm gray, 160-gram Canson Mi-Teintes paper

The dimensions are 30.5 by 23 centimeters.

Photo of a framed print. Thin matte aluminum border. A pencil is placed next to it to indicate scale.

Works well in a 30 by 40 cm frame, as you can see.

Price: €275. This includes the mat, but excludes the frame.

Buy a print, support the research

I will donate ten percent of the proceeds from selling this print to Sovon to support this important work. Read more about that here.

Want to buy one of the original prints? Contact me.

Design notes

The question was how different it would be to work on a larger scale. Would that offer more freedom? Would more be possible? Would something perhaps be lost?

Detail of the beak and head. There's a slight gradient from light cream to gray on the cheek.

In the last few prints of 50 birds, I had found a way to place elements at angles other than 0, 54, or 90 degrees. These extra possibilities quickly proved useful in designing the hobby and kestrel. They have larger wings that end at a pointy slant. The tail also needed to be angled differently for a balanced pose.

The larger dimensions, combined with those unusual angles, made the design process considerably more complex. Finding the right shapes and fine-tuning their proportions required numerous test prints. Even those initial test prints for the overall shape quickly required multiple printing plates, precisely because of those unusually angled elements in the types. Because, as always, where the shapes overlap, they can’t be printed simultaneously.

Bigger sizes also offer more room for detail. But those spaces weren’t necessarily easy to fill. I suddenly needed one and a half thicknesses, or circles in an intermediate size that wasn’t available.

The way I could stylize the designs in 50 Birds didn’t transfer directly to this larger format. Clearly, a matter of working at a different resolution.

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