Earth Tones

This is Jan-Hendrik Lourens, an artist with the intention of sharing creative ideas through various art mediums, with concepts involving his life experiences and thoughts about self, others, history and society. I was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and after a series of subjectively influential events, ended up in Vancouver, Canada, where I now study Psychology and Sociology at Trinity Western University while pursuing my ideas as an artist. This platform is a chance to look deeper into the mind and imagination of a creative individual who wishes to spread love and inspire you to consider his approach to art.

JAN’S APPROACH TO ART

The idea of Earth Tones is to focus purely on expression of thoughts and emotions and entirely disregard the end result of whatever art piece one is interacting with. This can be through any medium. An example for myself would be painting: for most of my pieces I have no idea of an end result or certain image I am trying to create. I spend some time looking inward in attempt to get a sense of my current thoughts and feelings, then think of what colours come to mind when considering these thoughts, then what shapes come to mind, and then as I build it, I put into reality my thoughts around the topic of what I initially was thinking about. Or with music: I try not to focus on what I want the song to sound like. Instead, I take an approach that seeks to purely express in the rawest form possible my thoughts and feelings around the lyrics in correlation to the sounds and chord progressions that are mixed with it. If it helps to explain, when you are listening to my music you are directly interacting with an expression of my imagination about my thoughts and feelings around certain things, and not a song where I tried to execute a certain musical genre or song-type. My goal is for you to try this as well. In whichever way you feel comfortable and through any medium you could possibly think of. Spend some time with yourself, objectively look inward - how do you feel? What are you thinking about? How do you feel about the thoughts you are having? What colours come to mind? What shapes or symbols come to mind? What words come to mind? Lose yourself in it… What can you learn about yourself through the process of doing this? And then send it to me because I really want to see it and talk to you about your experience :)

Here is some of the work i’ve done…