Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Venus Rising From the Deep

In the deep blue mirror glass, Venus turns her face into the light, and what returns her gaze is not paint or print but a field of fine scratches, held in the surface itself. Her profile, the curl of her hair, the line of her shoulder all live where the surface has been opened to catch the light. Everywhere else, the glass keeps its silence, and the goddess steps forward from a blue so deep it reads as the sea she was born from.

That blue is not decoration, it is the myth itself, the colour of the water Venus rose from, of depth, of something ancient that never quite settles. It carries the whole piece the way the sea carries a story that is older than any single telling of it.

No paint, no print, no ink. The image is scratched into the surface through controlled surface damage, a field of individual marks that only becomes a face and a gesture when it is seen as a whole. Up close it is texture and abrasion, from across the room it is monumental, a figure caught mid turn in a corridor of blue light.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. The face and the raised hand are always present in the glass, and under a stronger light the contrast simply deepens, the scratches catching and holding the room around them. What changes is never Venus, only the reflection that surrounds her.

Because the surface is mirrored, the room you stand in, and you within it, are folded into the same blue as the goddess. You are not looking at Venus so much as standing beside her, caught in the same glass, part of the same rising light.

There is a quiet symbolic charge in choosing her for this, a goddess best known for what was taken from her, an arm lost to time, a story told for centuries through absence as much as form. Here that same logic of removal becomes the very way she is made visible again, damage read not as loss but as structure, and beauty returning through what has been taken away rather than added.

Venus Rising From the Deep continues the Art on Mirror series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which scratched imagery is set into coloured mirror glass and the viewer becomes part of the work. A visual language where damage is not destruction, but structure, and where the mirror turns looking into taking part.

"She surfaces not in paint, but in what the light was allowed to keep."

About Art on Mirror – Blue

Art on Mirror is a body of work in which the image is scratched into coloured mirror glass, and the world in front of the work becomes part of it. Every line is cut into a deep blue mirrored surface of acrylic glass. The scratches are always there, bright against the colour, while the surface around them keeps reflecting the room, the daylight and the person looking.

From a distance the image reads clear and complete, a pale figure held in a field of blue. Step closer and the work opens into a delicate web of individual marks, fine and deliberate, each one essential to the whole. Behind and between them the mirror does what a mirror does. It carries the room and the viewer into the composition, so the surroundings in the work change with the place where it hangs, while the image itself stays firmly in place.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The blue ground absorbs and reflects, the scratched lines catch and hold, and under a focused spotlight the contrast deepens until the figure takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality. In softer light the colour comes forward and the work settles into a quieter register, without ever losing its subject.

Blue is the colour of night, of deep water and of quiet distance. That is the emotional ground every work in this series is set against, and the subjects are chosen to belong to it.

Art on Mirror continues the scratched imagery of Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma on a new ground. Where the black works draw their power from absence, these draw it from reflection. The viewer is no longer only looking at the work. The viewer is in it.

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.