From a young age, I was fascinated by faces and how we ‘read’ them to gauge someone’s personality. The duality between apparent perfection—especially from a distance—and the imperfect reality from closer up intrigued me too.
It took quite a while before I began putting my artistic learning into practice. And in the end, I seemed to fall into it by chance: by making a portrait of my daughter, using little pieces of glass, in my husband Dirk Neefs’s workshop.
The result was amazing and intriguing – for myself and others. I had intuitively developed a style and method in which I could lay my creative and artistic ‘egg’. And my work hit a chord with the people who saw it.
We are now about ten years down the road, and my portraits are hanging among pieces by renowned artists in galleries around the world. I had never dared to hope for this level of success. But I am proud of what I have accomplished and the growth path I have been travelling since the very beginning. Isabelle Scheltjens
After ten years of dedication and refinement in creating glassfusing portraits, Isabelle has ventured into an exciting new artistic challenge: creating sculptures in glass crush and marble. These new works are not only technically masterful but also emotionally profound and visually stunning.
Elongated and stretched sculptures are a fascinating artistic concept where traditional images of faces are distorted to offer a new perspective and interpretation. This technique challenges the viewer to look more closely and discover the deeper meaning and emotions within the portraits.
In the context of visual art, these distortions are intended to confront the viewer with questions about identity, perception and the human condition. Elongating and stretching of faces can have different effects: it draws attention to certain features or emotions, and it invites the viewer to reflect on the relative nature of beauty and normality.
In Isabelle Scheltjens’ work, where these distortions are present, it can be seen as an extension of her exploration in pointillism and the optical effects of light and colour. By narrowing and stretching faces, she invites the viewer to dig deeper into the concept of perspective and think of how our perception of reality can be altered or influenced by art. Dirk Neefs
Whether much has changed since the very beginning? “Nonetheless,” Drew says. “ Isabelle has grown tremendously as an artist . The combination of creativity, inspiration and technique has remained.
She is still unique in her art form. But where she used to ‘compose’ aesthetic portraits with pieces of glass in an “artful manner, her new works feel more like paintings. They radiate more self-confidence, are more striking, dominating the space. You feel the shimmering energy that radiating from them. I expect great things from Isabelle.
Her feeling for glass is unparalleled, as is the spark she knows how to create. She’s just getting started ,” Drew concludes.
Drew Aaron (Gallery Red, Mallorca)
