Ewoud de Groot

“We are pleased to have Ewoud de Groot as the 2019 BTT Artist of the Year,” said Bill Legg, who serves on the BTT Board of Directors. Each year we recognize a great nature painter or sculptor, usually someone who is connected to the saltwater world of the species that we are trying to protect. I have marveled at Ewoud’s bird paintings and was thrilled when Steve O’Brien told me that Ewoud would donate a large-scale painting of terns. Many thanks to Ewoud de Groot for helping to support our research.”

Ewoud de Groot lives and works in Egmond aan Zee, a coastal village in the Northern Netherlands. After receiving a degree in illustration and painting from the Minerva Academy of Art, he began illustrating nature books for a period before pursuing painting full-time in 1999. Today, de Groot is recognized as a rising star in wildlife painting, bringing a truly unique perspective to the genre.

His work strives to find both a balance and a tension between the representational and the abstract, the traditional and the contemporary. For de Groot, painting wildlife is not an exercise in rendering all the exact details. Instead, his work is an ongoing experiment of composition, color, and technique, concerned with conveying a sense of mood and atmosphere found in the natural world.

“To me, as an artist, producing a good painting is about exploring all the different facets of composition, color and technique and not just reproducing an image in a photorealistic way,” said Mr. de Groot. “Although I consider myself a figurative painter, I always try to find that essential balance and tension between the more abstract background and the realism of the subject(s). In a way you could say that I am on the frontier between figurative and non-figurative, or the traditional and the modern.”