Marlien Venema lives and works in Koog aan de Zaan, a town near Amsterdam. She studied graphic design at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam and fine arts at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, Netherlands.

People and landscape play a central role in the work of Marlien Venema, in which she explores a sense of freedom, paradise and adventure. The inspiration for the paintings are her memories from her childhood both living abroad and the rural countryside in the Netherlands, packed with curiosity and explorations. She paints to recreate this longing to freely venture.

While being adventurous one can get homesick or risk being lost. In some of her paintings a distance to the figure depicts this sense of feeling adrift. And other related themes also appear in the work. Some paintings have the likeness of utopia or the search for a new home, represented by household objects. Together Marlien’s paintings form a sort of a story of a journey or perhaps a quest.

These stories can be considered universal themes that can be told in many different ways. In a fast changing world we need to choose whether to stay with the old or a try new path. Those choices are never easy. Either staying or going will take courage which we often do not have. We do it anyway and hope things will come out better for it.

Marlien Venema starts her work usually based on parts of found images and family photos.  The use of photo negatives gives the image a feeling of both nostalgia and abstractness. A strange mixture of dreaminess and detachment at the same time. These qualities are important because it not only dictates a painting, but it also confirms the narrative of saying farewell, hoping and longing.

Last but not least, the use of color. Color and texture are inherited from her mother, who works with textiles. All over her childhood home there were rows of plant dyed wool in every color you can imagine. Woven to artworks on huge looms and knitted to numerous jumpers. She slept under handmade quilts and wore handmade skirts. All these textures and colors have made its way into her current work. Color can make an artwork zing and Marlien tries to use it to transcend a picture to this more universal story and sometimes even to a sense of the sublime.

Education:
Nieuwe Academie Utrecht 2018 (post academic year led by Frans van Tartwijk)
Koninklijke Academie Beeldende Kunsten The Hague 2004-2008 (fine arts / painting)
Willem de Kooning Academie Rotterdam 1992-1996 (graphic design)

Other:
member of the art collective Art Allies
member of the art collective Tengel
previous: treasurer of art collective Stichting Popinnart (2019-2022)