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.
We are now about six 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.
Glass is a rewardingly creative material. Delicate and powerful. Transparent and colourful. Modest and expressive. It makes it possible for me to use the special technique of ‘glass fusion’ to make portraits that carry my message: the ambiguous relationship between distance and proximity, between abstraction and detail, between a beautiful appearance and a confronting reality.
Minute, painstaking preparation goes into every portrait. This labour-intensive method is in stark contrast to the ‘fleeting’ nature of our contacts, relationships and way of life … Maybe that is in fact the most important message. Take your time. Stand still every now and then. Reflect. Contemplate. Cherish what you love. And keep an eye out for beauty in all its forms.
Isabelle Scheltjens
