“To practice a new craft, no matter how well or badly is a way to grow the soul. So do it.”
Kurt Vonnegut, postmodernist and writer
Dutch artist Heleen Engelen has always been fascinated by the metaphysical consciousness, specifically the interaction of animate and inanimate nature through human consciousness and its rendering through objects and art.
As a child, she spent hours collecting treasures from nature, fascinated by the shapes, colours, textures of stones, shells, plants, and seeds but also the stories they held within them. Contemplating and turning them over with her eyes and hands, they served as creative inspiration as she transformed them into little art works that she showcased around the house. Heleen’s penchant for collecting, cataloguing and creating has continued throughout her life and now spans inspirational objects and images from her travels around the world. As Eberhard Arnold stated, she still looks with the eyes of a child, allowing to lose herself in objects of wonder.
Studying and working as a designer allowed Heleen to translate her passion and fascination for objects into the new creation of new objects designed around people’s modern and varying needs. She travelled the world studying rituals and behaviors, collaborating with creatives of all nationalities; infusing all this inspiration and travelling anthropology into her work at Philips Design. Over the course of 25 years, she designed appliances, lighting objects, medical equipment, and interface, always putting the user at the center, listening to their need to reimagine the existing into alternatives that could help ease and improve lives. She believes as the French statesman, poet and historian observed that this process has made her more complete as a human and every trip changed her perspective on life.
The abrupt pause of COVID-19, forced Heleen to stop traveling and provided her important time to reflect and realise that she had become too busy, diminishing her space to be creative herself. Fascinated by the journey of life and the potentially positive objectification of people, quarantine allowed her time to start painting portraits, rediscovering her creative skills and a new canvas to express herself.
With the world opening up again, Heleen enrolled at the Arendonk academy in Belgium and so began her journey with oil and a focus on portrait and model painting and the launch of her very first private view; a series of new works that have been a lifetime in the making.