Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Stillness Before the Strike

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Stillness Before the Strike begins in darkness. A leopard emerges from it slowly, head and shoulders caught in a sharp, cinematic light, its spotted coat dissolving back into shadow before it ever fully arrives. The eyes are the only certainty in the frame, locked on the viewer, holding a silence that feels like the second before something happens.

The image is not painted or printed. It exists because the surface of the acrylic glass has been altered, worked away rather than added to. No paint. No ink. What remains is a portrait built from controlled scratches, a coat and a gaze drawn out of removal, out of restraint, much like the animal itself.

Move around the piece and the leopard changes with you. Light catches the surface differently from each angle, and the image slides between sharp clarity and quiet restraint, between a creature fully present and one settling back into the dark it came from. That instability is the point. A predator this composed is never fully still, even when it looks it.

From a distance, the portrait reads as a single, monumental presence, poised and complete. Step closer and it dissolves into a field of fine, deliberate marks, countless individual decisions that only resolve into a face again once you step back. Between those two views sits the tension the whole series lives in.

There is a symbolic weight here too. The leopard is patience made visible, danger held in reserve, elegance that never announces itself before it needs to. Emerging from pure black with nothing around it to soften or explain it, the animal asks to be met on its own terms, the same way the work itself asks to be read through light rather than given all at once.

Stillness Before the Strike continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"Some presences don't need to move to be felt."

About Art with Scratch

Art with Scratch is a body of work in which the image is not drawn, but released. Carved line by line into a deep black surface, each work emerges through countless precise scratches that catch the light and bring form out of darkness.

From a distance, the image appears almost photographic. Powerful, recognisable and full of presence. Yet up close, the work dissolves into a dense field of individual marks. Fine, fragile and almost weightless. What seemed solid reveals itself as a delicate web of lines, each one a deliberate gesture, each one essential to the whole.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The black surface absorbs, while the scratched lines reflect. As light shifts across the surface, the image breathes. From one angle the figure stands clear and defined. From another it softens and settles back toward the darkness from which it came, without ever disappearing. Under a focused spotlight, the contrast deepens and the image takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality.

What makes this medium so compelling is its quiet tension. The act of scratching is direct and irreversible. Every line is a decision that cannot be undone. Yet the result is not harsh. It is intimate, atmospheric and alive with movement. Hardness becomes softness. Destruction becomes creation. Absence becomes presence.

In works such as this portrait, the figure is never fully fixed. Through the interplay of line, light and shadow, the image shifts with perspective and atmosphere. At certain moments, the subject seems to step forward out of the black. At others, it settles back into stillness. It is within that movement, between sharpness and calm, that the work comes alive.

Like all materials touched by time, the surface carries its own quiet life. Each scratch holds a moment, a breath, a gesture. Together they form not just an image, but a presence, one that continues to reveal itself with every change of light.

About the Artist

My name is Tijs Dragtsma, founder of TD Fine Art Studio.

As an artist, I am driven by a constant desire to explore new visual languages. I do not see art as a fixed style, but as an evolving field of discovery where material, structure, light and emotion come together.

My work often begins with a simple question. How can a material speak in a new way. How can hardness become intimacy. How can precision create emotion. That search lies at the heart of everything I create.

Within TD Fine Art Studio, each body of work is approached as its own world, with its own logic, atmosphere and visual identity. Some works are built through rhythm, repetition and structure. Others emerge through absence, shadow, reflection or tension. What connects them is a shared commitment to originality, clarity and emotional presence.

I am fascinated by contrast. Between strength and fragility. Between control and feeling. Between what is visible and what is left open to interpretation. My goal is not simply to make an image, but to create a work that holds attention, invites reflection and continues to reveal itself over time.

TD Fine Art Studio is the space in which these explorations come together. It is not only a studio, but an evolving artistic universe shaped by curiosity, precision and the ambition to create work that feels distinctive, intentional and alive.

*All purchases paid for between 3 August and 16 August will not be shipped within the usual three working days due to my holiday.

These purchases will be carefully packed and shipped between 17 August and 23 August at the latest. After your purchase, I will personally keep you informed about the expected shipping date.

Thank you for your understanding.