Frank den Os
Crozon-sur-Vauvre
Letting go of words opened up a space I didn’t know I’d been longing for.
Message
Frank den Os (b. 1965, Dordrecht, Netherlands) is a visual artist working from Crozon-sur-Vauvre in rural France. Over decades as a playwright, he cultivated a deep sensitivity to narrative and human perception. In his painting practice, this foundation has expanded into an exploration of visual experience: how we perceive nature while wandering our internal landscapes, searching for the thresholds between clarity and obscurity.
Den Os’s work emerges from a sustained engagement with his surroundings. The daily quietude and raw presence of the French countryside guide his response to light, form and the elemental forces. Common phenomena like a shifting horizon at dawn, the turbulence of a storm, the stillness of a wooded path, all serve as starting points for his inquiry into presence and perception. He positions his work in the space between the seen and unseen or felt, situating organic forms in compositions that reflect both tension and harmony.
His approach integrates traditional techniques with contemporary sensibilities. Across series of acrylic, mixed media, and collage on paper, canvas or panel, Den Os channels the rhythms of nature through fluid lines, textured surfaces, and dynamic brushwork. The resulting images balance between structure and chaos and navigate between abstraction and recognition. This interplay creates a visual language that is at once personal and expansive.
Central to his practice is an attentiveness to contrast between light and shadow, motion and stillness, but most of all between the material and the emotional. Den Os regards each of his pieces an empirical response to what is out there, both external and internal. Rather than impose a fixed narrative, his paintings evoke the flux of experience and encourage contemplation of how we engage with the world and ourselves.
Den Os’ work has been included in international exhibitions and is held in private collections across Europe, the UK and the United States.
Statement
After years of writing for theatre, where every gesture, silence and sentence had to earn its place, my move into painting happened sudden. In hindsight it had been there all along, popping up occasionally, slowly growing into the force it has become. Letting go of words opened up a space I didn’t know I’d been longing for.
In my studio, the freedom of painting can be both grounding and overwhelming. Colours use their own languages and act as demanding and unruly as the characters I once created. My process also isn’t that different from writing, as it involves the same indirect movements around a lively inner noise and a shifting chorus of impressions, questions and impulses. But instead of speaking in dialogue, conversations reveal themselves in texture, lines, shapes and shades.
Each work is an encounter between the world around me and the world within. While painting, there’s a constant back and forth between perceiving and feeling, between what can be named and what can be sensed, so intuition is my only guide. When finished, each painting is meant to carry a pulse of presence, something that feels alive enough to invite recognition.
My studio sits in the countryside of central France, in a rough but peaceful landscape. These rolling hills of Le Berry, with its dense green forests, offer me both ongoing inspiration and isolation. I do however enjoy welcoming visitors coming to see my work up close and discovering pieces that never made it online. Seeing the work in person, in the context where it started, is quite different, very tactile and more honest.