About

Marc Tolud is a self-taught artist

living in Amsterdam. 

He read History of Art at the University of Amsterdam,  

before taking up painting at a later stage in life. 

Initially it was all about immersion into colours,

connecting them to moods, emotions, thoughts

and attempts to convey these to canvas.

It was during long years of living in strange lands -

Bangladesh, India, Belgium, Indonesia, America -

that painting and photography became his anchor,

as did the exploration into his works’ main subject:

imagining figurative aspects of the unfamiliar spaces

in our mind, the border region of consciousness. 

Mystical texts, literature, philosophy, folklore

- all were fertile sources of inspiration,

but it was in particular the body of the enigmatic thought

of the ancient Kabbalah,

as non-believer,

that proved an irresistible foray,

into a lesser defined realm of imagery.

As depiction of ‘the unseen’ within kabbalist context

is a complex issue and therefore more or less absent, 

Marc found artistic freedom there,

inspired by its beautiful poetry,

to create a unique iconography, 

revealing the galaxies of the mind. 

In his works varieties of our mental state are caught

in whirling color schemes and ethereal scenes, 

where people are not actual people but emotions,

dressed in peculiar garments

that may indicate a certain devotion

or perhaps a gender,

with strange spirits shaped like ammonites,

with mountains that are thoughts,

where the sun is the moon

and the laws of nature no longer apply.

The artist’s mission is to take the viewer on a journey

and create ripples in the subconscious. 

What actually makes his work so alive and singular

is its mysterious spectral nature,

yet it’s strangely familiar.