Street artist and illustrator Daan Botlek is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands and is popular for his unusual form of character-driven street art. Daan is one of the founding fathers of If Paradise Is Half As Nice (IPIHAN). IPIHAN is a self-initiated art project focused on making art in deserted structures. It aims to experiment new ways to conceive concepts, works of art, and ultimately an exhibition.
Painting walls has been his long time passion. The basis of all his works is drawing. He started making a lot of drawings of plain white men engaged in some action or interaction with themselves or others. Many of his artworks are created as visual narrative – they tell a story. He does a lot of drawing exercises – create assorted sketches. He files these sketches for his future drawings and murals.
“A sketch (ultimately from Greek σχέδιος – schedios, “done extempore”) is a rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not usually intended as a finished work. A sketch may serve a number of purposes: it might record something that the artist sees, it might record or develop an idea for later use or it might be used as a quick way of graphically demonstrating an image, idea or principle.” – definition from Wikipedia.
A collection of his sketches is “Scenes from Everyday Life”. Here’s a few of his amazing sketches.
‘Man is the measure of all things’ is a famous statement of Greek sophist Protagoras (ca. 490-ca. 420 BC). This phrase had a big impact on Daan and eventually became the main motif of his art. Man became his measure for creating art.
To know more about Daan Botlek, please visit his pages:
http://facebook.com/daan.botlek
http://instagram.com/daanbotlek