About the artist
Nico Seymus
A painter of myths, strength and imagination.
His story
Thinking
in images
I am Nico Seymus, a Belgian painter who paints the way others go for a walk: for myself. No commission, no fashion, no audience setting the direction. Just me, my brushes and the colours of my inspiration.
My paintings on canvas and panel, drawings, sketches and ideas grow out of curiosity and freedom: powerful women, prophets of a new religion, men in pain, faces floating between fantasy, myth and abstraction, abstract works that go to the essence. I do not explain them. I make them, let them go and let the viewer fill in the rest. I am a creative man who paints and draws because it is my own language, and whoever looks at it reads along.
I think in images, and always have. Before my head even touches the pillow at night, I am gone: into dreams full of colour and fantasy, into stories and adventures that unfold all by themselves. It happens during the day too, often and at the most varied moments. Spontaneously, without effort. Sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, when the face of the person I am talking to suddenly changes before my eyes or disappears into a dream image. In my professional life I have learned to cut that short quickly and focus. It is learned behaviour, and as a child at school it already bothered me enormously that I was not allowed to dream and had to fit into a straitjacket. Only at art school did I have my moment of revelation: there are others like me, free spirits who dream and create, people who think in images (or in music). That is where I was set free.
When it comes to emotions, too, I think in images. If someone asks me “how does that make you feel?”, I start searching, and the words I find are never quite right. Too small, too pale for what I feel. But in the meantime the image is already there, complete. That is what it does to me.
For a long time I thought everyone was like that, but that is not the case at all. Others have the words. I have the images. My imagination is a thousand times greater than my drawing and painting. Perhaps one day technology will let someone look inside my head for a while and smile in wonder at the beauty, the splendour, the creativity, the adventures, the colours and the madness.
So I paint what I cannot say.
Inspiration
What drives him
01
Abstract
Colour, gesture and rhythm, without figure or story. Fast, intuitive works in which movement itself becomes the subject.
02
Fantasy
Warriors, queens and mythical figures exploring the border between dream and reality. Strong, vulnerable and enigmatic all at once.
03
Visionary surrealism
A contemporary look at faith, technology and the unconscious. Prophets and strange figures that tip the familiar off balance.
04
Essence
Back to the core: form, colour and silence. As a keen diver, Nico knows the calm of the underwater world, and you can feel it in these almost abstract works.
05
Guardians
Watchers and keepers: figures who guard a threshold, a secret or a world. They do not attack and they do not give way.
How it works
Acquiring
an original
Interested in a work? You buy directly from the artist, with no intermediary.
Every work is unique
On canvas, wood panel or paper, in acrylic and mixed media. Only one of each work exists.
Personal contact
Ask your question through the contact form. Nico is happy to discuss dimensions, delivery or a visit to the studio.
Also as a print
Some works are also available as a print. If you have a special request, just ask.
In his words
The magic of not explaining
We live in an age of permanent access. Artists are expected to throw the studio doors open: the process, the materials, the doubts, the timelapse. Every week another curtain is drawn back, and the work itself becomes an afterthought. One question will not let me go: what does this add?
The usual answer is connection. But connection is not exposure. Knowing how long a canvas took, which brush the hand chose or what the maker felt on a Tuesday does not deepen the encounter. More often it flattens it. What has been fully told leaves nothing to guess. The work becomes a manual and the viewer a pupil, when he could have been a witness.
Mystery is not a marketing trick. It is the breath of the image. A work that keeps its silence invites the viewer to fill that silence with their own questions, memories and meaning. Whoever explains every step takes away the room imagination needs to play. Not knowing is not failed communication. It is an invitation.
There is also the question of ownership. How I work, why I work and what happens in the quiet hours before something exists belongs to me. Keeping that to myself is not shyness but protection. A process needs room to be messy, slow and unseen. If it is constantly narrated to an audience, it slowly begins to serve that audience instead of the work.
This does not mean hiding. Sharing your vision is generous and necessary: this is what I make, this is what I show. A quiet, clear place where the work can be found, a website, a portfolio, an exhibition, is enough. It says: here it is, take what you see. That is something different from an endless stream of updates that says: here is everything, all the time.
The pressure to share everything also quietly rewrites what an artist is. Suddenly you are a content creator, a teacher and a personality, with art as the raw material. Some thrive in that role, and that is fine. But it must not become the norm, and no one should feel obliged to take it on. Refusing to explain is not being difficult. It is a choice about the kind of bond you want with your audience.
What if we measured connection differently? Not by how much is shared, but by how much is felt. One image that lingers for days goes deeper than fifty posts scrolled past without a thought. Presence does not require constant visibility.
So let the work speak, and let it keep part of its shadow. Not everything needs a caption. Some things are most beautiful when they stay a little enchanted.
Nico Seymus
Follow the studio
Nico shares new works, sketches and a look behind the scenes on Instagram first.