Maarten Bakker (1969) grew up surrounded by drawing. As the son of architect (and gifted draughtsman) Rens Bakker, he could often be found in his father's studio. Whilst his father was at work, Maarten would sit on the other side of the drawing board, endlessly filling sheets of paper with drawings of cars, lorries, trains, ships and birds.
Maarten studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, where he specialised in advertising. Over the past thirty years, he has worked at various advertising agencies in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, devising campaigns for countless clients and winning a few Cannes Lions in the process. Today, Maarten works as an independent creative consultant in the fields of strategy, branding and advertising. Although being able to sketch ideas quickly is a useful skill in his line of work, it does not form the bulk of Maarten's daily work; in practice, he writes more than he draws.
Maarten lives and works in De Rijp, a small village 25 kms north of Amsterdam.
Get in touch‘The pleasure of looking at the world is one of the great pleasures of life. If you lose that curiosity, if you stop looking, then life becomes much smaller.’
— David Hockney
Maarten draws inspiration from the visible world around us. He seeks out rhythm, depth and light within it. He often finds these in objects, buildings and settings that are intended to be aesthetically pleasing, but also frequently in settings or objects that are purely functional. In his drawings and paintings, Maarten always strives to capture the essence of a landscape, place or object, from the rusted hull of a cutter in a Dutch fishing harbour to a taxi driver waiting in a square in an Italian city or the reflection of sunlight on the Mediterranean Sea. In his portraits, too, Maarten seeks out the uniqueness of a character. Or, as The Counting Crows sing in ‘A Long December’: ‘The way that light attaches to a girl.’
All the work is drawn or painted in plein air, whether that be on the street, by the side of the road, in the middle of a field or on a train station platform. The portraits, too, are drawn from life.
Drawing and painting from life - this is what it looks like.
