FALL ARTS FESTIVAL FEATURED ARTIST

Ewoud De Groot of Astoria Fine Art named
2023 Fall Arts Festival Featured Artist

For Ewoud de Groot, a Dutch wildlife painter living in Egmond aan Zee, Holland, a good painting explores more than one plane simultaneously.

”To me, as an artist, producing a good painting is about exploring all the different facets of composition, colour and technique and not just reproducing an image in a photorealistic way. Although I consider myself a figurative painter, I always try to find that essential balance and tension between the more abstract background and the realism of the subject(s). In a way you could say that I am on the frontier between figurative and non-figurative, or the traditional and the modern,” the artist described his work.

de Groot strives to find both a balance and tension between the representational and the abstract, the traditional and the contemporary. For the artist, painting wildlife is not an exercise in rendering all the painstaking details. Instead, it is an ongoing experiment of composition, color, and technique, concerned with conveying a sense of mood and atmosphere found in the natural world.

Ewoud de Groot lives and works in Egmond aan Zee, a coastal village in the Northern Netherlands. After receiving a degree in illustration and painting from the Minerva Academy of Art, he began illustrating nature books for a period before pursuing painting full-time in 1999. Today, de Groot is recognized as a rising star in wildlife painting, bringing a truly unique perspective to the genre.

de Groot is the 2023 Fall Arts Festival featured artist and his selected painting, ’Twilight Elk’ will be on display at The Cloudveil until it hits the famous auction block during the 2023 Quickdraw. This year’s Fall Arts Festival will be held on September 6-17. de Groot will also be showing a new body of works at Astoria Fine Art on the Town Square.

Ewoud de Groot has been named 2014 “Featured Artist” for the 27th Annual Western Visions show gathering on August 30th to September 21st, 2014. Western Visions is a signature event held through the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

After illustrating nature books for a couple of years, de Groot began painting full time. His work has been featured in many exhibitions in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His subjects are often seabirds and waders. He spends time on his Dutch shrimp cutter exploring the Waddensea, an internationally known wetland that is actually a chain of islands, mudflats, and sandbanks, starting in the Netherlands and ending in the south of Denmark.”

“I have many sources of inspiration in my work. As a boy, I would go out to the dunes and collect bird eggs and go fishing. When I became interested in art, I was inspired by the works of Lars Johnson before going to the art academy in Groningen. When I attended the art school, my style changed, and I was inspired by more modern painters like Rothko.”

de Woot’s technique enhances and compliments the primary subject in many of his paintings. He often will place his paintings on the ground and use an oil based ‘splatter’ technique to enhance an abstract quality to the paintings.

“This technique gives my painting a complimentary contrast… the background becomes more abstract against the realistic subject and the subject becomes more realistic against the abstract background. This provides a sort of tension…”

Using layers of cold bluish-and-brownish greys, the painters seeks a delicate balance of juxtaposition.

“I start a painting by sketching with big brushstrokes and using the palette knife to look for the right composition, not allowing myself to be distracted by specifics. Once the form of the painting has been established then I begin to work on the birds or a particular detail of the bird(s) themselves.”

Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival commemorative posters and the original painting is on display at the Cloudveil until it is offered for sale at the Jackson Hole QuickDraw auction on Saturday during the Festival. The artwork also will appear on the label of the special edition of Fall Arts Festival featured wines, produced by the Jackson Hole Winery.

Previous Fall Arts Festival posters

Each year, the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival presented by the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce features a commemorative poster. Would you like to purchase a poster? Call the Chamber at 307.733.3316. Availability may vary. Please note the $15 shipping & handling fee.

2023 "The Grandest Journey" by Troy Collins

$10 unsigned

22x28

2021 "The Wort Hotel" by Gary Lynn Roberts

$10 unsigned

22x28