Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Eyes Beneath the Bark

Eyes Beneath the Bark places you inside a forest that seems to know you are there. White birch trunks recede into a darkness so complete it feels like velvet, one hard light falling from above while the trunks behind dissolve into black. Somewhere among the peeling bark, dark marks gather into the unmistakable shape of eyes, as if the trees themselves have been watching long before you arrived.

Birch bark carries these marks naturally, the traces left where old branches once grew. Here they become something else, a quiet reminder that nature has always studied us more closely than we study it. The work holds a simple, unsettling question: who is really being watched, the forest or the person standing in front of it.

No paint. No print. No ink. The image is scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass, built through controlled surface damage rather than pigment, each mark taken away rather than added. What forms is not a picture placed onto the material but a grove of birches drawn out of what has been removed from it.

The image is always present, in daylight or in shadow. Light does not create it, it sharpens it. Under a directed source the scratches catch and reflect, the trunks gain depth, and the eyes in the bark seem to hold your gaze a little longer. It reads differently from different angles, without ever losing the image, moving between quiet stillness and sharpened clarity.

From across a room the birches stand monumental, a theatrical stand of trees lit as if for a stage. Step closer and the illusion resolves into a field of fine, controlled scratches, grain and floating dust suspended in pure black, proof that the whole forest was built one mark at a time.

Eyes Beneath the Bark continues the Art with Scratch series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print. Part of a limited edition of ten, it stands on the same conviction as every work in the series, a visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure.

"The forest was watching long before we learned to look back."

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.