We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mariken Van Heugten a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mariken , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

Sometimes I wish I had started my career earlier. I would have liked to have attended an art school right from the start, to have been among other creative people, to have lived this life with its deadlines, criticism, pressure and the presentation of my work. Then I would have had more time in total for artistic experiences. Sometimes I envy people who have chosen this path, I have the feeling that I missed out on something. On the other hand, I had more freedom to develop my art in this way without being hindered by any rules. Sometimes I think about whether I should still go to school, but I don’t think that would help me now. I don’t care if I’m labelled a hobby artist because I haven’t studied art, because I’ll go where I need to go. However, I wonder if it would make me feel less like an impostor, although I know that feeling doesn’t go away when you have more qualifications.

I’ve always been creative, but I lived it on the side, depending on the phase of my life. Sometimes it was more in the foreground and I took art lessons and created a lot. At other times the focus was different and I spent years not touching a pencil. As I had many other interests, I was steered in all sorts of directions. So I traveled a lot, lived in several countries, studied and worked, got a degree in business administration, got married, had two children and worked in international companies until I was 45.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a creative observer of the little things around me. I try to capture simple shapes, lines, structures and patterns in nature with ink on paper. If someone tells me that my work makes them feel happy, cheerful or light, with new energy for the day or new motivation to be creative themselves, then I’m happy all round. I mean: that’s it! If something that comes so easily to me can make people feel better, then that’s what I need to do. Drawing attention to simple forms, showing the lightness around me, will make people look more attentively. This can lead to more appreciation and respect for nature and more creativity.

So I make art with ink on paper and offer workshops in this technique. I love both and am very proud that I took the step to dedicate myself fully to this work. For many years I had a solid job in the chemical industry, which I enjoyed at the beginning and which also gave me the stability to maneuver through the different phases of my life, such as marriage, illness, birth, divorce, for which I am very grateful. Looking back, it would have been better to leave 5 years earlier, but it also felt like a gilded cage. A lot of people told me I was crazy to leave a stable, well-paid job like that. But in the back of my mind, I always had the nagging thought that I still needed to devote time and energy to the creative part of me. In the end, the decision was taken away from me when the company fired me, which I gratefully took as a sign.

The obvious difficulty in my work is finding a way to be 100% self-sufficient with my art. How far do you want to go when you create art for sale? Then you would only create art that sells, and maybe not the art you want to create. I’m lucky that my art is quite accessible and not very complicated, so some people can relate to it. That makes it easier for me to find the overlap.

I don’t like selling my own work and I’m not very good at it either, so I would love to have an agent to do the selling and marketing etc for me. If I could choose, I would go for a combination of activities. Creating, teaching, commissioned work, exhibitions. One may dream, right?

As my art is somewhere between art and illustration, my idea is to receive royalties from art licenses, which would free me up financially to explore other creative activities. I was able to gain initial experience on fabrics, posters, cards and wallpaper. And it was great to see my own designs realized. The wallpaper I made was created from a small A5 sketchbook page. A friend commissioned me to design the wallpaper, so I thought I’d give it a go. The absolutely positive aspect of my decision to change careers is that it forced me to be braver and simply dare to do more. I used to think ideas to death, so nothing ever happened because I always found super good reasons not to put them into practice. I thought I didn’t have enough knowledge and that other people were much better at it. Just the experience of trying something you’ve never done before (like putting on a solo show or designing a wallpaper) and then actually realizing that IS possible once you get going, gives you an immense confidence boost. I’m very thankful about the new people around me who pushed me in this direction.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I don’t want to say that it was no effort at all to set up my Instagram account. Because I was and still am very active on social media. I post daily, and reply to all questions and am thankful for remarks. But honestly, I didn’t have a plan beyond sharing what I had created. The rest was probably about being in the right algorithm at the right time… I find it difficult to give advice as Instagram has changed a lot. I think my account is growing backwards at the moment because I’m not following all the trends anymore. In my opinion, the prerequisite is that you have a real passion that you want to share with others, but also that you connect and interact with them. After all, there are real people behind your followers. Also, any effort you put into understanding social media trends, marketing and sales is very likely to help. The question you should ask yourself is how much time and energy you want to spend on it.

Social media can definitely help you grow, as it did for me, but yes, the medium can also decide to change its rules and then you can follow or leave it. For me, it’s still a great place to meet interesting people (most of whom are actually fellow creatives and not art collectors as one would wish), socialize, get inspired and share my work.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

The idea of enjoying art virtually sounds interesting. It also looks like artists were earning quite some money with it. So I invested some time and energy to understand how NFTs work. I’m not a very technical person so it took me some effort. The difficulty was that when I was looking for ways to collaborate, I just couldn’t find any serious people who wanted to discuss the topic. I asked my community about their experiences and it was all negative. My own experience doesn’t go beyond very strange and non-serious requests either. I really tried to engage in a conversation to find out what to do next, but it went nowhere. The answers were strange and repetitive, the accounts looked very dodgy, in no way interested in art whatsoever. I didn’t want to sell my art to the few people I met, in any form. The little I found out in my research is that the blockchains that NFTs are built on consume huge amounts of energy for their processes, which disqualified them for me because they are not sustainable. That’s why I’ve now blocked NFT messages.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marikenvanheugten.com
• Instagram: mvheugten