Tijs Dragtsma (1992) - Van Gogh in Scratched Light

Vincent van Gogh looks straight out of this work, and that is the first thing held onto: the steady, almost unbothered gaze of a man who has just survived the worst week of his life and chosen, instead, to study his own face. This is after the Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, painted by Van Gogh in January 1889 and now kept in the Courtauld Gallery in London.

What survives here is everything the original needed to be recognised at a glance: the heavy fur cap pulled low, the thick winter coat buttoned to the throat, the white bandage wound around jaw and ear, and above all that gaze, fixed and unflinching. What is given up is the colour the painting is loved for, the ochre wall behind him, the green coat, the small warm notes Van Gogh placed around his own wounded head as if testing whether paint could still hold steady when his hand could not.

What remains is built from a field of individual marks, scratched into the surface of the acrylic glass rather than laid onto it. The face gathers the most light of all and holds together as a single bright mask, carrying the eyes, the set mouth, the short beard. The bandage catches a second, softer glow, a loose bright shape wrapped around the jaw that reads before anything else does. Cap and coat are handed almost entirely back to the dark, surviving only as a thin crescent of light along the fur and a faint spark where a single button once sat, so the whole lower half of the man dissolves into the same black as the room around him.

There is a kind of honesty in that imbalance. Van Gogh painted this portrait to prove, to himself as much as to anyone, that he could still look at his own damage and set it down plainly. Here the damage is literal again, cut into the surface rather than brushed onto it, and the bandage, once a sign of a single terrible night, becomes the brightest, most legible part of the whole composition, the one fact the dark refuses to take back.

Van Gogh in Scratched Light belongs to After the Masters, a series within Art with Scratch by Tijs Dragtsma in which imagery is constructed through controlled surface damage rather than pigment or print, and in which that same damage becomes a way of asking how little of a face, stripped of colour and context, is still enough for the eye to know exactly who it is looking at.

Light does not create this image. It sharpens it, deepening the contrast across the bandage and the planes of the face while the coat stays folded into the dark, so the portrait reads differently from across a room than it does up close, without ever losing the man at its centre.

"A face can lose its colour and keep its truth."

About Art with Scratch

Art with Scratch is a body of work in which the image is not drawn, but released. Carved line by line into a deep black surface, each work emerges through countless precise scratches that catch the light and bring form out of darkness.

From a distance, the image appears almost photographic. Powerful, recognisable and full of presence. Yet up close, the work dissolves into a dense field of individual marks. Fine, fragile and almost weightless. What seemed solid reveals itself as a delicate web of lines, each one a deliberate gesture, each one essential to the whole.

Light does not create the image. It sharpens it. The black surface absorbs, while the scratched lines reflect. As light shifts across the surface, the image breathes. From one angle the figure stands clear and defined. From another it softens and settles back toward the darkness from which it came, without ever disappearing. Under a focused spotlight, the contrast deepens and the image takes on a sculptural, almost luminous quality.

What makes this medium so compelling is its quiet tension. The act of scratching is direct and irreversible. Every line is a decision that cannot be undone. Yet the result is not harsh. It is intimate, atmospheric and alive with movement. Hardness becomes softness. Destruction becomes creation. Absence becomes presence.

In works such as this portrait, the figure is never fully fixed. Through the interplay of line, light and shadow, the image shifts with perspective and atmosphere. At certain moments, the subject seems to step forward out of the black. At others, it settles back into stillness. It is within that movement, between sharpness and calm, that the work comes alive.

Like all materials touched by time, the surface carries its own quiet life. Each scratch holds a moment, a breath, a gesture. Together they form not just an image, but a presence, one that continues to reveal itself with every change of light.

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.

This listing contains AI-generated visualisations. Please refer to the original photographs to assess the actual condition of the object.