Marieke Druiven

 Marieke Druiven's work feels suspended somewhere between the familiar and the unreal. Her figures and environments carry the strange familiarity of something half-recognised, as though ordinary objects have quietly drifted out of place without fully leaving reality behind. Cardboard, clay, rough pencil lines and thick paint remain visibly present within the image, leaving fingerprints of the process exposed instead of concealed. Nothing feels entirely polished or fixed. Her work hovers in a state of becoming. Raised around painting, sculpture and music, creativity appears less like a conscious career choice for Druiven than something inherited and continuously lived through. Her father worked as an oil painter and sculptor; her mother performed in the Dutch 1980s band White Honey. It is perhaps no coincidence that Druiven, Dutch for grapes, comes from a family shaped by artistic practice itself. The grape never fell far from the vine. 

"Radio Cyanide" Vera Poster

Her route into illustration was not entirely direct. Before attending art school in Groningen, she studied Philosophy with Astronomy as a minor, following what felt like the expected academic path after secondary school. However, the structure never fully aligned with her way of thinking. "I just really didn't like the academic rules," she says. Art school followed, and the shift was immediate. "As soon as I started doing art full-time, I was like, okay, this feels completely good." Those earlier interests never quite left though. Philosophy resurfaces through conversation and reflection, in the way she talks about images. Astronomy left something harder to shake altogether. "We're this tiny speck in this huge universe, it's crazy." She says it the way you might say something obvious that somehow keeps astonishing you. The absurdity of scale never stopped being interesting. 

Today, illustration and animation occupy most of her daily life, not simply as work but as something that extends naturally into friendships, domestic life and the studio she shares with fellow illustrator Fynn van der Ziel. "I just make art all the time. Even setting up our home, or when we got a dog with my partner, it requires preparation. It's all just making stuff."

"Crack Cloud" Vera Poster

For Druiven, creativity is less a mode she switches into than a way of moving through the world entirely. She gravitates towards surfaces that preserve traces of the hand. Her long-running Instagram handle is aardkluit, Dutch for clump of earth, and she describes her work as "a bit crusty". Not slick or overly refined, but visibly shaped through accumulation, as though the image has slowly formed rather than been perfected. "Even when you draw a simple circle manually and then scan it, it has more life to it. I think it needs physical hands to sort of breathe life into it." Accidents belong to the process too. A recent papier-mâché sculpture dried incorrectly; she tore part of the face away and rebuilt it entirely. "It's really like a conversation that you're having with the material. You sort of adjust to it and then just work with it." 

"Wieland Lentefeest" Promotional Poster

Druiven is less interested in documenting reality than in constructing a particular mood, something unresolved and hovering just beneath the surface. "I like when it has an edge. Like you think, oh, something's going on." Melancholy, humour and ambiguity coexist without resolving into one another. Ideas arrive quickly and get sketched into notebooks she carries throughout the day. Her poster work for bands and concerts makes this instinct most visible. Asked about the strong shifts between different posters, from subdued and sombre compositions to sharper, high-energy designs, she explains that the process begins with absorption. "I just listen to the music, and then it just pops up in my head." She responds to tone and sensation before anything else, letting the music shape colour and 

composition before eventually arriving at the typography, a part of the process she admits does not come as naturally as illustration itself. 

She prefers to leave the rest open. "It doesn't have to be analysed. You can just feel something from seeing it."