"I believe every artist creates their own world, from an inner world that I envision as a place in the mind and heart where all impressions are filtered and converge into a specific image. This is usually triggered by sensory information. Artists are open to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling, and experience the urgency to create from there. I certainly know this is true for myself"
Marjanka Jonkers
Water, Air, and Land
Marjanka can now look back on a period of her artistic career in which she clearly sees the defining moments in her creative life. As a child, she lived near the sea in Wassenaar, in the dunes in Bergen aan Zee with her family, and spent summers in flower-filled Ventimiglia, Italy with her mother’s Indonesian family. With her father, she took long, high, spectacular hikes in the mountains of Switzerland and France, where she encountered rocks, formations, rare plants, and panoramic views (her brother became a geologist for a reason).
Academy and University
As a teenager, Marjanka knew she wanted to create, to become a maker. She first sought this at the Fashion Academy in Amsterdam. Her time at the academy became a journey of self-discovery, a figurative period, a quite literal embodiment of her teacher’s preferred approach.There, she learned to work incredibly hard on multiple assignments simultaneously and to distribute inspiration and ideas across various projects.
Ultimately, she wanted to learn how all the makers in the world arrived at their creations and what their processes were. She craved a scientific approach and deepening her knowledge and subsequently studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in architecture, chosen because architecture is a total concept of expression, Everything came together for her in the study of architecture. She saw architecture as a complement to ans adaptation of nature, allowing humans to live and express themselves within it. Her studies took place at the then-iconic Art History Institute at Herengracht 286-290, a work of art in its own right.
In addition to Art History, Marjanka studied Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Museology at the UvA and various art classes at the Vrije Academie in The Hague to further her creative skills, including sculpture, etching, screen printing and photography.
Abstraction, Texture, Light, and Colour
Gradually, as an artist, she developed a fascination with materials and their incorporation into increasingly intuitive and abstract images, consisting of textures, light, and colour. At the seaside in Bergen and in the countryside surrounding her family home in Italy, she creates books full of sketches and photographs, often figurative, which she then abstracts and transforms into wall art.
The essence of art
The essence of Marjanka’s work lies in her exploration of how to shape the places where water, air, and land converge. She also incorporates less visible processes such as shifts, layers, and divisions of events in society and the world into her images. She still works with the same urgency to create that she felt as a child.