van den hooven » Unraveling the Chaos: the emergence of van den hooven’s unique art style

Unraveling the Chaos: the emergence of van den hooven’s unique art style

vandenhooven 2 January 2022

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).

I still remember how it came to me actually. I was driving to my psychologist, like I do every month, I was listening to that very song, and I just thought, “what if I make an artwork out of this?”. Everything starts with an idea right?

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 decided that I wanted to make a single unique artwork representing this song. But rather than connect everything how it’s supposed to be connected, I decided that I would try connect at least those three main organs together the wrong way. To show how messed up things are… then later I added some kidneys. In some other artworks there is a liver (althought that is not as easy to recognise what it is).

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.

Next, I simply add objects that I like to draw, or ones that have special meaning to me. The spectacles for instance started out as a tribute to my late father who worked at OPSM for over 30 years. They first appeared in this artwork. I thought they looked cool, so I decided to draw them again. So what happened was that in the following artwork, I thought it looked a bit like an android, so in the next artwork after that, I tried to make it appear even moreso. So the inclusion of the android robot into my style was essentially an accident, a fluke. But I think it goes well, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Lastly, I’d like to talk briefly about how the medium of watercolour and wax pencil came to be. When I was doing my illustration diploma, they told us to experiment and trial loads of different mediums to see what we liked to do and use the most, also what we were good at. Looking back, it appears my first experiments with watercolour and wax pencil were this “the male gaze” series, which was done on tracing paper of all things (big mistake). These three particular artworks are still available on my Etsy shop by the way.