Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - An Inverted Hush

An Inverted Hush holds a sloth mid-suspension, hanging by four small claws from a branch that offers no more solid ground than the dark surrounding it. There is no floor, no sky, only a body turned upside down and kept there by a stillness so complete it reads as devotion.

Its fur is unlit, folded into black, touched by algae the way years fold into a life that has stopped rushing. A narrow halo of light clings to the outline of the animal and fades out within a hand's width, offering the sloth to the eye before returning it, almost at once, to the black it came from. Only the claws stay bright, two fine lines holding the whole creature to its branch.

This work is scratched into deep green coloured mirror glass, a green close to the algae the sloth wears, so the material and the animal share a single quiet colour. The image is not applied onto the surface, it is opened directly into it, through controlled surface damage, a shape made by taking away rather than laying down.

The scratches stay visible in every room, at every hour. Light does not summon this sloth from hiding, and it does not make the animal vanish when it turns away. It only sharpens what is already there, the claws catching brighter, the halo gaining depth, the black growing more absolute. What changes with the room is the reflection around the sloth, never the sloth itself.

Because the surface is coloured mirror glass, the room enters the piece with you. Around the scratched outline, in the black between the lines, your own shape settles into the glass, so that looking at a sloth suspended in its private stillness quietly becomes a way of joining it there.

From across a room the work reads as one hushed, dark gesture. Up close it resolves into a field of fine, deliberate scratches, each one a small decision that only becomes a sloth once you step back and let your eye finish the work.

An Inverted Hush 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.

"Stillness held upside down, until even the light agrees to slow down."

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.