About Mies

I’m Mies, born and raised in Rotterdam, where I spent my childhood wandering through the port. I wouldn’t necessarily say that this was my primary choice, if it were up to me back then I would have chosen a mountain area with conifers and deciduous trees. But I guess my paintings would have looked a bit different then.

Eventually I found beauty in it, fascinated by its noise and motion. Everything around me felt chaotic, yet there was always a rhythm beneath it, a hidden order that seemed both comforting and restraining. I could never tell whether the chaos shaped the rhythm or the rhythm allowed chaos to exist. That question has followed me ever since.

In 2020 I moved to Amsterdam to study Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, drawn to the systems that give structure to life and the human desire to break through them. Here I’ve found the missing melody from my childhood in music and honestly, much more than that.

Maybe my way of rebelling has always been an indirect attempt to answer that childhood question: how much chaos can rhythm hold before it stops making sense?

In every line and hue, I search for freedom within structure. My work lives in the space between order and rebellion. My art is, and always has been, a protest against a world that constantly pressures us to be the same. That’s why I use high contrasts, dominant shapes, and bright colors. They refuse to blend in.

For me, art is both a study and a protest. Through painting I explore the tension between order and rebellion, the fragile balance between control and release, system and self. It’s where rhythm meets chaos, where noises become color and shapes collide until they find harmony in resistance. My work questions what we accept as normal, searching for beauty within disobedience.