Colorful and wonderfully lavish graduation work by Amber Hyacinth

Decorated vases, a fruit bowl with a handy banana hook, a wall hanging, drawings, paintings and also thirty cartoonish portrait tiles of Princess Beatrix (with cigarette), Maarten van Rossem (the Smartest), a lobster and much more. Colorful and wonderfully lavish with pink as the predominant colour. “I loved pink since I was a kid,” says Amber Hyacinth. “After that came a phase that pink was actually not allowed, but I still like it. It also reminds me of Caribbean merriment.”

The still life is a connecting factor in her work, says Amber Hyacinth (24), who graduated as an illustrator at Artez Zwolle, but interprets it so broadly that she now rightly calls herself a ‘mixed media artist’. She depicts many objects in two and three dimensions, rum bottles, dominoes, paint cans, a Nintendo Switch game console, a sympathetic cow, and so on. “I find it interesting to tell a story with stuff. At first I mainly used existing objects, but I started making more and more myself. That way I could also put in symbolism that had meaning for myself.”

Her vases and pots can be used for flowers and plants, but are primarily their own object. They regularly have a nose and ears, or a black glazed braid as a handle. Metal earrings hang from the ears, and the vases are decorated with drawings of flowers and so on. “I have a great love for plants. I often drew them, but I also wanted to create a work of art for the plant itself. My first vase wasn’t watertight, I hated that, but now I don’t care anymore. Just put a plastic jar in it.”

She started making tiles out of a need for speed. In the beginning she painted on vases, but then it was a lot of work to make that vase and then the pressure was high; what if the painting fails? All the work for nothing. Now she only has to cut off a piece of clay and she can get started with an idea. “I can put down such a picture in half an hour. With engobes, pigment powders to which you add water and clay, you can paint directly on the tile. For me it’s not about an exact picture, but about the fun of making lots of tiles.”

Together with her parents she went to flea markets, thrift shops and the from an early age Africa Festival in Hertme in Twente to buy beautiful things. “We created little altars everywhere in our house. I was always surrounded by beautiful things.”

She has a thing for lobsters and clays, and often draws and paints them. “The vase My life as Leendert is about my critique of luxury living and materialism. Ordering such a large bowl with a lobster on it in a restaurant I see as the pinnacle of luxury and the perfect symbol of it. Cancer is super expensive and the way they treat the animal…” Leendert de Cancer, after whom the vase is named, is a friend of SpongeBob in the well-known animation series. „In an episode they will live as Leendert”, says Hyacinth. “They’re going to do crazy, dangerous things that don’t suit them, and things get completely out of hand.”

Amber Hyacinth will follow a teacher training course next year. “But first I want to see what I can do in the art and illustration world for a year. I will create a lot of work, although I will also have to take a part-time job.”