ABOUT THE ARTIST
“I had to shift from feeling myself in the past, to feeling myself in the present and reflect the present and future into my art.”
Johanna Van Parijs is a mixed-media artist, interior designer and intuitive healer based in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. These aspects of Johanna’s repertoire are subtly yet intimately interconnected, and reflect principle, guiding tenet: the ways that art can be an instrument of healing.
Belgian-born, Johanna grew up in the city of Ostend in the country’s Flemish region, where she was able to explore her artistic creativity from an early age. This largely stems from the influence of her grandmother, who was a seamstress and oil painter. Johanna recalls halcyon days spent at her grandmother’s house – a treasure trove full of artistic materials, color and creative freedom where she used to draw on the bedroom walls.
Art became a refuge to Johanna,
whose early-life involved various emotional challenges and complexities. As Van Parijs grew older and matured as an artist, she mined the capacities of the artistic medium to transform her own experiences. This led her to interest in the thematic interplay of memory, loss, and temporality.
Van Parijs studied three-dimensional art at LUCA school of Arts in Ghent, and completed a masters in video-art. During this time, she began to explore depth, layers, texture and mixed media, and started exploiting these attributes in her artwork in a bid to make her art “feel alive”
The next iteration of her artistic expression came through interior design, with her first project being a camp in the Omani desert. Her aptitude for designing interiors is interwoven with her artistic sensibility: she is fascinated by how aesthetic components ‘speak’ to one another across space. Johanna’s has continued designing residential interiors in Costa Rica.
