How did van den hooven’s style arise?
What I call the van den hooven style did not happen quickly. It has evolved slowly, over approximately the last five years. Read on.
You may think that I am able to “see” images beforehand although that is not the case. Nor am I under the influence of any kind of hallucinatory drug. I never have been. This is important to me. I didn’t simply pop some kind of pill and draw what I saw. Rather, I think creativity is a skill and it can be learned just like any other.
I originally started by illustrating each organ separately. You can see the gradual progression of some of these organs throughout some of my previous digital illustrations.
For example I previously did a lino print of a heart with a pair of scissors in it to represent the pain and heartbreak of getting a divorce. This happened to me in 2015.
Next I drew a close up image of an iris to represent the fear in someone’s eyes. The original inspiration for this particular piece came from the Guns N’ Roses song “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and in particular the lyrics:
She’s got eyes of the bluest skies.
As if they thought of rain.
I’d hate to look into those eyes and see an ounce of pain.
If you look closely at the iris you can see the outline of fists, as if to imply physical violence. So the idea of pain (or in this case fear) appearing in someone’s bright blue eyes came to me from there.
In another illustration I drew an ear and part of a brain for a student project about hearing loss:
I drew a stomach, intestines and kidneys (shown in white) and I suppose that’s a liver in another digital illustration, as part of an online illustration course:
I did a cartoon-style drawing of a human foot in response to my recent ankle surgery. I was going to give it to the surgeon on a mug as a thank you but I never got around to it.
But really the main idea for putting some organs together in one artwork came from another song by Guns N’ Roses, entitled ‘Coma’.
In this song you really get the sense of someone unconscious but still breathing (lungs), you can hear a heart beat (heart) and Axl talks about how messed up their mind is (brain).
Please understand me
I’m climbing through the wreckage of all my twisted dreams
But this cheap investigation just can’t stifle all my screams
And I’m waiting at the crossroads, waiting for you
Waiting for you
Where are you?
So I wanted to represent this song in a single unique artwork. And so on the way to my psychologist, I decided I would connect everything together the wrong way. To show how messed up things are.
During this time I was inspired but not motivated, and so I sat on my idea and did nothing with it for several months (or maybe it was a few years, I can’t remember). I never really put just those three main organs into one artwork; eventually I decided to add extra ones like a pair of kidneys a stomach and large intestines.
I ended up modifying the original heart as I wanted to make it simpler, almost like an icon, a symbol or a logo even. I only did that after I did some of my first A5 studies.
At that point, I was really only missing the nose and the mouth. So I added them too.
In other words, I didn’t just look at somebody and ‘see’ organs all over the place instead of where their face should be. I think that is very important.
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