Art by Ruud van Empel

Dutch Artist Ruud van Empel has taken the digital manipulation of photographs to a new level. From the mid-nineties onward, Ruud van Empel devoted all his endeavor to art photography, developing his images in thematic series. Since 2002, Ruud van Empel has been working a great deal with nature and, in doing so, he has definitively found his present day characteristic visual language: photographic works with an unbelievable clarity of colour, rich in detail, with intriguing representations, and a fairytale ambience. Children are often featured prominently in his images. Ruud van Empel combines forms on the computer and assembles pictures that deceive our perception. His work balances between reality and perfection. They are magical-realistic images, as it were, a cross between narrative painting and staged photography. (First sentence Roy Exley, rest Frank van de Schoor). In 1996 Ruud van Empel started ‚The Offices‘, his first series not linked to the field of applied art since he left university.



To create these works van Empel first lays his ideas in a sketch. He uses every detail from his huge archive of picture-stories and art magazines. Beside this he creates his own accessories by scanning objects and by redesigning theses scans to get the result needed.

Finally his images are growing on the screen of his computer as digital collages, the same process like he uses in the work after 2000 and for what became so well known all around the art world.

Ruud van Empel