Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Ember on the Line

Ember on the Line holds a single suspended moment: a comic book heroine caught mid call, telephone receiver pressed to her ear, eyes closed, lips parted, as if the voice on the other end matters more than anything else in the room. She is drawn in the visual language of 1960s romance and war comics, but stripped down to its bones here: thick, even contour lines and coarse Ben Day dots, shaped not in ink but in a field of individual marks worked into deep red coloured mirror glass.

The image exists because material has been taken away, not added. Where the surface has been worked, light gathers and the figure glows in fine white lines; everywhere else, the drawing's original black becomes the undisturbed red of the mirror glass itself, holding her in near total darkness but for the single spotlight beam falling from above.

Red carries its own charge here. It is the colour of urgency, of the heat behind a phone call held a beat too long, of a decision already made before the line has even connected. It turns a private, quiet gesture into something closer to a held breath.

The image is always present, with or without directed light. What changes is never the drawing but the room around it: under a stronger light the scratches catch and the contrast deepens, sharpening what is already there. Light does not create this image. It sharpens it.

Because the surface is coloured mirror glass, not canvas, the space around her keeps shifting. Whoever stands before the work finds themselves drawn faintly into that same red field, standing just behind her shoulder, part of the silence she is listening into. Monumental from a distance, up close the figure resolves into a field of fine scratches that the eye reassembles into a woman holding a phone.

Ember on the Line 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. This work is unique.

"Some calls change nothing. Others change everything before a single word is spoken."

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.