Peripheral Vision

This piece is very unique because it shows the evolution of my artistic style. The colours are more accurately applied than previous attempts. There's no dark grey texture applied anywhere.

You see two great big eyes, a heart, a school of fish, a pair of spectacles, a flamingo, a mouth, an ear lobe or two. There are also tentacles, pills/capsules, the top half of a crustacean, a spatula, a the head of a garpike, a security camera, a neuron (cell).

There are a pair of lungs; a pair of kidneys (separated); a large intestine (shown in a horrible muddy brown, something which I did not repeat); a brain (again, the brain being an early style of one). For the first time, the heart is depicted in these classic colours of mine, also, this was one of the first pieces do do away with some of the detail on the heart (the veins).

This was one of my early attempts to group all of these objects together into a single drawing. The objects presented here show more of a "connection" to each other than previous drawings. There is only one like it.

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van den hooven is an emerging Australian abstract cubist artist whose style is instantly recognisable for its quintessential features: bold lines, consistent colour palette and his symbolic logo-like depiction of facial features, bodily organs and other familiar objects.

His compositions are intentionally cluttered and contradictory, reflecting the chaos of modern life through a unique visual language that fuses the internal with the external, the animate with the inanimate, the natural with the technological.

Born into a lineage steeped in creativity, van den hooven’s artistic roots trace back to his grandfather Abraham Leendert van den Hooven, a Dutch sailor-turned-self-taught artist who settled in Australia in the late 1950s. His mother, Margarita Rosa, also pursued fine art, nurturing a household where creativity could flourish.

Coming from a science research background, van den hooven’s own journey into art was reignited after completing diplomas in graphic design (2016) and illustration (2018).

His work often explores themes of consumption, identity, internal conflict using familiar and quintessential objects—facial features, organs, androids, tentacles, surveillance cameras, crustaceans, fish, and more—to challenge viewers’ perceptions of necessity versus excess.

Looking forward, van den hooven is holding his inaugural solo art exhibition at the Clyde Gallery, Bay Pavilions Art+Aquatic centre, Batemans Bay, in August 2025.