I’m Nynke van Zwol, born in 1972 in Friesland, The Netherlands and now living in Noord-Holland, same country.
I’m an artist, first and foremost.
Officially, you could say, because I graduated from the Wackers Academy of Fine Art in Amsterdam, in 2015 at age 42.
But unofficially, my whole life.
Before art I tried all kinds of things. Philosophy, Arabic… I have a Master’s degree in Linguistics, too. I even worked a couple of years as a clinical and forensic linguist.
I do love language.
But I love art more.
As it turns out, language and art combine beautifully. You see, I have this thing for the oldest languages, the scripts that no one can read anymore. They fascinate me so much that I’ve made my own undeciphered script, which landed me neatly in the club of asemic artists (check the link if you want to know what that means).
I do more than just write unreadable texts. I paint landscapes too. Empty, silent landscapes with empty, silent buildings in them. They are the places I wish I could go when life gets too noisy and crowded. They don’t exist except in my mind, so I paint them. My Silent Land.
And animals. I love animals. The forgotten ones, the creepy ones with their many legs and shiny shields, the smallest ones with their impossible alien faces. Frogs, beetles, deep sea creatures. And sometimes, hardly ever, almost never, a creature with four legs, fur and a tail.
Art is magic. Magic is in my blood.
Education
Fine Art, Wackers Academy of Fine Art Amsterdam, 2015
Speech and Language Pathology, Hogeschool Utrecht, 2005
Linguistics, Leiden University, 1998
Arabic, Leiden University, 1995
Philosophy, Leiden University, 1995
