About Sandra van de Pol

My name is Sandra van de Pol and I was born and brought up in the west of the Netherlands. As a child, I dabbled in creative pursuits from time to time, but I mainly focused on sport. When I contracted COVID-19 in October 2020, everything changed. The virus affected my whole body and my brain. I could no longer do anything and had to slowly rebuild everything from scratch. Once I was able to do a little again, I slowly started painting. That’s when I discovered that this is where my passion lies and that I could best express myself through my art. I began by painting with acrylics on canvas, mainly creating abstract works. This was partly because I was unable to work with precision due to the way my brain was functioning at the time. Later, when I was able to, I started to focus a bit more on figurative painting. Still using acrylics. I’m still searching for my own style. I now mainly paint about my experiences during my illness, how I now experience the (outside) world, and portraits.

I haven’t studied art, in any discipline whatsoever. I get my knowledge from the internet and TV programmes. I also evaluate my own paintings and think about what I can do better next time.

What’s also increasingly fascinating me at the moment is photography and the digital possibilities it offers. At its core, it’s a pure and unadulterated representation of reality, but with editing it can become a completely different genre and a completely different work of art. I’m curious to see wh