About Rinus

Born and raised in the Netherlands, drawing was part of my life from a young age. My parents encouraged this, and both are capable painters themselves. Drawing and making things were part of our childhood, not in a formal artistic sense, but as something natural and worth stimulating.

Much of what I do now is self-taught. I learned by trying, by failing, and by studying what I considered the best examples, until my skills improved. This has made me fairly critical of my own work, yet I have found this to be a necessary part of becoming better in the visual arts. It did not only improve isolated techniques, but proved useful across multiple disciplines.

Over the years, my interests moved through many forms of visual art, including drawing, painting, photography, digital art, and digital matte painting. At the same time, I developed a broader sense of capturing reality into still imagery. Photography became especially useful in this, both as a discipline of its own and as a base for reference in landscape painting and digital work.

Growing up in the Netherlands, mountains were always somewhere else. A longing for mountains and the outdoors first brought me to New Zealand, a country that stayed with me deeply. Its landscapes also became tied to Middle‑earth through the Jackson films, which made the journeys there feel personal in more than one way.

Later I discovered Sweden, closer to home, with the aged and tranquil landscapes of the north. Here I met the woman who became my wife, and here we now live with our daughter. This is one of the brightest parts of my life, and while Rinus’ Art is not about family directly, the work is made within the life I have built here.

The Swedish fjäll and surrounding landscapes have changed both the rhythm of my life and the kind of places I can return to. Long winters, quiet forests, open mountains, and the changing light are now woven into daily life here. I do not want to overstate this, but these surroundings have become part of the ground from which the work now comes.

My attachment to Tolkien’s writings started young, inherited in part from my father. At first the books were too difficult for me, but the films opened Middle‑earth in a way that drew me in. They are not without flaws, yet I still enjoy them, and Howard Shore’s score remains an absolute masterpiece to me.

Soon, I read The Lord of the Rings properly in English, and from there the wider legendarium followed, with The Silmarillion and in particular The Children of Húrin becoming the tales I like best. Tolkien’s work has stayed with me because there is a depth and longing in it that does not seem to fade, even after returning to it many times.

The visual side of Middle‑earth shaped me as well. Alan Lee was an important influence, as were the concept artists and matte painters who worked on the Jackson films, with Dylan Cole being a personal favourite. Their work was part of the reason I became interested not only in Tolkien’s stories, but also in giving imagined places a believable visual form.

My focus is predominantly on traditional oil painting. The Middle‑earth maps began as a passion project, and although they became an important part of Rinus’ Art, they are not something to develop endlessly once completed. I still enjoy working digitally, in particular when creating digital matte paintings, but digital works remain digital until they are printed.

The tangible element in traditional paint is something quite special. I explored many aspects of the visual arts, yet came to a personal understanding that my ultimate form of visual art is the physical painting. It requires much technical skill, patience, and knowledge of how light behaves, but it also has a material presence that no screen can truly replace.

Landscape painting remains one of the forms of art I respect most. I have always looked up to paintings that make me want to be in the place they show, especially the alpine landscapes of Edward Theodore Compton and Edward Harrison Compton. The way they capture light while remaining expressive is beyond compare.

Even though we have some great Tolkien illustrators, their work is usually illustrative in nature and not quite like the landscape masterpieces that I feel so much for. I am under the impression that Tolkien’s stories deserve works like these as well. Some of my own paintings and prints come from that thought.

Rinus’ Art is a small one-person studio. I make the artwork, produce the prints, pack the orders, and handle correspondence myself. This gives me direct control over each step in the process, allowing me to ensure the very highest quality I can achieve.

I print my own work because printmaking is not just pressing a button. It is a craft in its own right, and more complicated than might be assumed. The choices of paper, colour management, printer profiling, and the reproduction of fine art itself all influence the final result. These are partly technical matters, yet not separate from the artwork once the work is meant to exist as a physical object. More about how the prints are made can be found on the print information page.

The same applies to art reproductions of traditional paintings. Having the original painting at hand allows me to compare, adjust, and correct the print myself. I would rather work this way than hand the final stage to a production service that never saw the original work and cannot judge the result against it in the same way.

Any work of art I make comes from a desire to create, whether it is a place or a feeling I want to express. Tolkien is a major source of inspiration, yet so are the mountains and, now more than ever, the landscapes of northern Sweden. I want to make images that invite the viewer in, make them look around, and perhaps give them a desire to explore more of what is shown.

I do not use AI or machine learning for any of my artwork. Some of the work is traditional, some is digital, and some moves between the two, but the images themselves are made by hand through my own decisions, corrections, and visual judgement. This is worth stating plainly because so much Tolkien-related imagery online is now AI-generated.

A digital artwork is not the same as a generated one. Even digital matte paintings and my maps require a major amount of skill, and still depend on choices made by the person doing the work. The same is even more obvious with traditional painting, where the physical surface, the paint, and the hand cannot be removed from the result.

I also try to keep the work as physical as I reasonably can. This is partly why I moved towards printmaking instead of focusing solely on digital art. A physical print has presence, and becomes part of the room in which it is displayed, in a way that a digital image on screen never fully can. It becomes an object, and that object deserves the same attention as the artwork itself.

Even in smaller parts of the process I prefer this approach where it makes sense. For the product photography, I created a complicated physical background rather than making one in Photoshop. It is only a small example, but it fits the same preference: if something can be made honestly and physically, I would rather do that than fake it without reason.

What I make comes from personal passion, but also from a sense of responsibility towards the source material. Tolkien’s world is not something I want to use lightly, and I hope the Middle‑earth maps and Tolkien-inspired art prints show the care, patience, and respect I believe it deserves.