Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Horns Drawn From Fire

Horns Drawn From Fire begins where the bull disappears into its own darkness, its lowered head and the mass of its body given as one unlit form, so the animal reads less as something observed and more as something remembered, a shape held at the edge of visibility.

Only the outline survives as anything close to light, a thin halo that hugs the animal's edge and dies again within reach, and along the curve of the horns two fine bright lines that seem to have been drawn straight out of embers. Nothing else is given. No ground, no floor, no wall, only the animal and the dark that keeps it.

The image is not applied onto the surface of the mirror, it is opened into it, formed through a field of controlled scratches worked into deep red coloured mirror glass, so that what glows is not paint or print but the material itself catching light along its wound.

Red carries its own charge here, the colour of blood kept warm under the skin, of heat that has not yet become flame.

Because the surface is mirror as much as image, the room and whoever stands before it are pulled into the red around the horns and the dark of the body. The work is never finished by the wall it hangs on, it is finished by the person who steps close enough to be caught inside it.

From across a room the bull is monumental, a single dark mass with horns lit like a warning. Up close that same mass resolves into a field of individual marks, patient and exact, proof that the image was taken away rather than added. Light does not create it, it only sharpens what was already there, and the reflection may change with the room, but the image stays.

Horns Drawn From Fire 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.

"The fire is not around the bull. It is what the bull is made of."

About Art on Mirror – Red

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 red 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 red. 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 red 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.

Red is the colour of blood, of fire and of everything we cannot stay calm about. 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.