Jasper van den Ham
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Jasper van den Ham is a Dutch painter. He worked as a fine art photographer first, and started working directly onto his own photographs. He never trained formally and figured it all out on his own. Instead of a blank canvas, he paints on medicine boxes, packaging, book pages, and old prescriptions with his name on them. He grew up moving from place to place, and his landscapes are made of several places at once, none of them real. His colors are often "wrong" in the usual sense, chosen for how a place felt. He is represented by Contempo Gallery in Rotterdam.
Q: First of all, tell us a bit about your path. How did you move from photography to painting?
A: Before painting, I worked as a fine art photographer. Photography taught me how to observe, but over time I realised I wanted to move beyond observation. There came a moment when I started painting directly onto my photographs. I didn't have a clear plan—I simply felt the need to add something that reality couldn't provide. That became the turning point. Painting gave me the freedom to create places shaped by memory, imagination and emotion rather than by what stood in front of the camera. I never formally studied painting, so, much like photography, it became a process of teaching myself through curiosity, experimentation and making.
Q: Has painting changed the way you look at the world, now that you're not seeing it through a lens?
A: Absolutely. Photography trained me to notice the world, but painting taught me to question it. I'm less interested in how a place looks than in how it changes inside memory. I now find myself paying attention to atmosphere, colour, fragments of architecture or the feeling a place leaves behind rather than trying to capture it accurately. I think painting has made me more aware that memory is constantly editing reality, and that those transformations can sometimes feel more truthful than the original experience.
Q: You paint on medicine boxes, packaging, book spreads, even prescriptions. How did that start?
A: It started very intuitively. I liked the idea that a painting didn't have to begin with a blank canvas. Everyday objects already carry traces of use, history and previous lives. By painting on medicine boxes, packaging or old book pages, those existing stories become part of the work rather than something to erase.
That interest eventually led me to painting on found canvases as well. I'm fascinated by the idea that every surface already has a past, and that painting can become another layer within that continuing history.
Q: Do specific places from your childhood still turn up in the paintings?
A: Yes, although rarely in a literal way. I moved around frequently as a child, and I think those experiences created a lasting sense of being between places. Fragments of different memories often merge into a single landscape, so a painting may contain elements from several locations without belonging to any of them.
Recently I've started exploring this more directly in my series "Places That Remember Us", where memories of childhood places have become a more explicit starting point.
Q: You describe your colours as sometimes "wrong" in conventional terms. How do you actually pick your palette?
A: I don't think of colour as descriptive. For me it functions much like memory itself. Sometimes the colours come from observation, but more often they emerge intuitively to reinforce the emotional atmosphere of a place rather than its literal appearance. Even while I'm painting, I often already see certain colours appearing before I put them on the canvas. Over the years I've become increasingly interested in layering colour, allowing different tones to interact so that the paintings feel emotionally richer than a straightforward representation ever could.
Q: What would you still like to explore in your work?
A: I feel as though I'm only beginning to understand where the work can go. I'm currently developing an Atlas within my "Internal Geographies" series, mapping relationships between imagined landscapes that gradually revealed themselves over time. At the same time, my residency in Morocco has introduced a completely new visual vocabulary. I'm interested in how architecture and pattern might slowly become part of my own language without losing sight of the questions that have always driven the work: how memory reshapes our experience of place, and how painting can make those invisible transformations visible.
