A LIFE SHAPED BY CREATIVITY
I’m Krista Brockbernd, a photographer, designer, artist and writer based in the Netherlands.
I always seem to be making something.
With a camera, pencil or paintbrush in my hand. At my computer working on a design. Or at my writing desk, where my first novel is slowly taking shape.
For a long time, these felt like separate worlds. Photography was my work. As a brand designer, I created visual identities for creative businesses. Drawing and painting were things I always hoped I would one day make more time for. And somewhere in the background was the long-held dream of writing a book.
Until I realised I didn’t have to keep them separate at all.
In my atelier, they now come together.
IT BEGAN WITH PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography has been an important part of my life for many years. My camera has taken me to beautiful places, particularly in France and England, where I photographed old houses, châteaux, remarkable interiors and exquisite hideaways for my former business Escape into the Light
I began to notice that I was always drawn to the same things.
Light falling through old windows. Walls marked with patina. Linen, weathered wood and faded colours. A door with paint worn away by time. A garden that isn’t quite too perfect. Objects that have clearly had a life before us.
My camera taught me how to look.
Not only at the bigger picture, but at the small details that give a place its character.
And I still carry that way of looking into everything I make.
FROM IMAGE TO IDENTITY
Alongside photography, I worked as a brand designer for creative businesses. I helped people translate their ideas and stories into a visual identity — through typography, colour, photography, graphic elements and all those small details that make a brand feel like one complete world.
Looking back, it isn’t so very different from the rest of my work.
It began with looking, too. Noticing what someone is drawn to again and again. Which colours keep returning. Which images evoke a feeling. Which details make something unmistakably theirs.
Perhaps that was the part of brand design I loved most: taking all those separate elements and slowly bringing them together into one world.
And that is exactly what I am doing again now.
Only this time, with my own work.
THE ART OF LEARNING
Over the past few years, I began to feel the need not only to capture and design, but to make something with my hands too.
So I returned to drawing and painting. I have now created my own art school — with myself as its only student — learning classical drawing and painting techniques while slowly discovering my own visual language.
As a result, my atelier sometimes feels more like a classroom than a studio.
Drawings lie beside tubes of oil paint, old books next to colour studies, while scraps of paper, photographs and found objects seem to gather everywhere, waiting to become part of something one day.
I rather love not knowing exactly where it will all lead.
STORIES FROM THE PAST
There is one thing that finds its way into almost everything I make: my fascination with the past.
Old houses, historic interiors, paintings, handwritten letters, documents, textiles and objects whose original owners have long since been forgotten.
I can become endlessly fascinated by something as simple as an old notarial deed.
Who were the people whose names appear on that piece of paper? Where did they live? What happened on the day they signed it? And why has this particular piece of paper survived for two hundred years?
That curiosity is increasingly where my work begins.
With a painting or drawing. A pattern. A colour palette. A photographic project. A design.
Or a story …
AT THE WRITING DESK
Because somewhere amongst the paint, photographs and sketchbooks, there is now a manuscript too.
I am writing my first historical novel, The Ink Between Them.
The story unfolds across two timelines and begins with an old chartreuse in the Dordogne and a collection of notarial deeds. Slowly, they begin to reveal the stories of two women living more than two centuries apart.
Writing has turned out to fit surprisingly naturally amongst everything else I do.
Places I photographed years ago become locations. Historical research sparks ideas for illustrations and patterns. Old documents inspire designs. Colours discovered in an interior find their way onto my palette.
Everything is beginning to connect.
MY CREATIVE WORLD
And perhaps that is what this atelier is really about.
Not choosing between being a photographer, brand designer, artist or writer.
But staying curious. Learning, collecting and making.
Finding an old object and seeing a story in it. Photographing a place and discovering years later that its colours have found their way into a painting. Reading a historical deed and suddenly seeing a scene from a novel unfold in my mind. Or gathering seemingly unrelated images, colours and ideas until they begin to tell a new story together.
This website is where I collect that world.
Here you will find photography, paintings and drawings, design, my search for a creative language of my own, and stories from my writing desk. I also share what I am learning, discovering and making along the way.
Some ideas may remain experiments.
Others may eventually become prints, art, patterns, books or something that does not quite exist yet.
And perhaps that is what I love most about making.
I don’t need to know where it will all end.
– Krista