BIO 

Maayke Bal is a Dutch contemporary artist and psychologist. From a young age she has been an alround creative and creator. Maayke is intrigued by human nature and psyche, both in their best and worst forms. She holds the strong belief that that the best within and amongst people can occur as long as the worst is not denied, for denying the negative comes with dangers, loss and hypocrisy.
Maayke has always had a broad interest in art, sociology, psychology, economy and geopolitics. She held positions in the fields of addicion treatment, forensic psychiatry and in the Dutch prison system, both as a psychologist and as a prison director. She established herself as an independant psychologist/ relational therapist after some major life events and started to persue a serious art carreer.
 


Reflecting on her own childhood, being a loving mum for her three children has always been vitally important for her. She is also grateful she found real romantic love. 

The task she has set herself on her artistic path is to remain faithful at all times to her primitive, non-rational and free artistic impulses as her artist's compass. Maayke has reached the point where her abstract art is integrative and eclectic, with wax and oilpaints being the great unifyer in all works.



STATEMENT

The leading force in creating an artwork is my internal psychoanalitic process, a never ending associative stream of thoughts, feelings, impulses and actions. The beauty of the good as wel as the pains of the bad in this and my world are my big source of inspiration. Written words, their symbolics and meanings, are often the catalyst for my associative and creative process. They become part of the painting, but only as a hidden secret.

I found a way to integrate all my loved arts, drawing, painting, collage, printing, writing, sculpting and textile arts, and my materials of choice into one creative process with a leading and unifying rol for oilpaint en beeswax for their sublime qualities.  

After the first intuitive layers of my work, intentionality and disturbance alternate in search for pleasing balances between timeless composition and expressive rebelliousness, between movement and stillness and between bright and softer colors. Gushing, smearing, glazing, milling, scratching, cutting, sticking, sculpting, heating and fusing, I explore color, shape, value, and texture till the piece feels complete.