Subconscious Dimensions

This piece was essentially inspired by the Guns N’ Roses song “coma”. In that song you can clearly hear the breathing, the heartbeat, and the brain is disconnected. Everything is jumbled up, the organs.

This is an ongoing exploration and it shows the progression of my illustrative style. I was originally going to include other things such as a telephone and my intention was to do a digital illustration. But I decided to start by doing an artwork (or a series of artworks) on paper that just featured bodily organs instead.

This is one of my earliest works in this series. You can tell because I don’t draw/paint the hearts with the veins in them anymore. These days I still draw the valves coming out of the heart so that they join ‘continuously’ with the other objects (if you get my drift). I think this is possibly the first work to depict that. The only difference is, these days I tend to always draw the valve tubes in a beige/off-white colour.

Also, my brains have evolved somewhat and if you look at any of my more recent works, they kind of resemble walnuts now. This brain has a more traditional, random, less stylised approach to it.

And lastly, you may notice that I don’t draw tracheas with concentric circles on them anymore (and again, this work is one of the first to show that way of doing it).

This is one of the first of two works in which I really started to control the colours of pigments in my watercolour palette (after I got rid of a load of pigments that I didn’t like). I incorporated more neutral pigments in the overall colour palette, giving it a more harmonious feel.

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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.