Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Where a Face Once Bloomed

"Where a Face Once Bloomed" opens on a bronze bust worn to the soft verdigris that only decades of air and rain can leave behind. Where the face should be, there is nothing: a perfectly round, perfectly smooth void, closed and black, swallowing a wide share of the frame. Only a narrow bright rim survives around the skull, a last line of light holding the shape of a head that has otherwise been erased.

The portrait is not applied onto the surface. No paint. No print. No ink. It is scratched into deep green coloured mirror glass, and that green is not incidental: it is the colour the bronze itself has been worn into, the patina of time made permanent in the material rather than merely photographed. The likeness exists only because material has been taken away, controlled surface damage standing in for pigment.

Seen from across a room, the bust reads as one monumental gesture, weight, shadow, and a void that pulls the eye toward its centre. Move closer and that certainty dissolves into a field of fine scratches, each one catching the light differently, none of them alone, all of them together the reason a face can be missing and a portrait can still exist.

The mirror never lets the viewer stand outside the work. Around the bust, in the untouched glass between the scratches, the room and the person looking are folded into the reflection, so that whoever studies this ruined portrait is, for a moment, folded into it as well, standing where a face once bloomed.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it. The scratches hold their shape in low light and in full light alike, in a quiet room and a bright one; what changes is only the reflection moving across the surface, never the portrait itself, never the void at its centre.

The void is as much the subject as the bust, identity worn away until only its outline remains, set in a green so deep it reads almost as absence, with the viewer's own face drawn into the space where another face used to be. Where a Face Once Bloomed 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.

"A face can be taken away. The shape it leaves behind cannot."

About Art on Mirror – Green

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 green 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 green. 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 green 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.

Green is the colour of growth, of forests and of things that keep returning. 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.