Studio profile: Joris Maes

Impasto landscape painting, worked outdoors in a single session and never retouched in the studio. That practice is easiest to see in a specific piece — "The Vantage", oil on canvas, 980 × 1260 mm — which took shape the way most of Joris Maes's work does: slowly, and with more revision than the finished surface lets on.

How the studio runs

Working a piece to completion in a single outdoor session, with no studio retouching afterward, forces decisions an artist working over months never has to make — there's no revisiting a passage once the light that produced it is gone.

Sourcing materials — the specific linen weave, a particular pigment line, a paper with the right tooth for pastel — matters more to a finished piece's long-term durability than most collectors think about, and more than most artists talk about publicly.

What the work is actually doing

Collectors who visit a piece more than once before buying — even just returning to the same online listing across a few days — tend to report fewer regrets than collectors who buy on the first look, which says less about impulsiveness and more about how attention itself changes an assessment.

Rotating what's on the wall, even within a small apartment, keeps a collector looking at pieces rather than past them — familiarity is the main enemy of actually seeing a painting you've owned for three years.

"The Vantage" remains one of the clearer entry points into Joris Maes's work on Bello — One viewpoint, returned to across a year. The figure was the last thing added and the only thing painted from life.