Natural-Warp

Intro

I was born in the autumn of ’76 somewhere in between the forests and meadows of Belgium as George Hoeylaerts. I started studying arts at the age of 9 and in the year 2000 I graduated in the Fine Arts - Graphics Design & Visual Arts. By then I learned how to use a wide spectrum of mediums and how to turn my visions into creations.
Going from experimental photography, paintbrush, screen-printing, painting with oil and acrylic, into welding & sculpting and later to dive into the digital world of artistry was completely random and pure fun. The results were my way to try and send some playfulness out into the world by creating many paintings, installations, and sculptures.
15 years later – after all this time searching and experimenting with styles and techniques, a healing dream led me to the more psychedelic approach I’m handling nowadays.

My new Nindo

My new style of art - immediately found great success within it’s first year of being released in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Portugal and only a few years later it started traveling around the world.
While on the outside it was a sudden change, I can trace this external change back to an event that encouraged change on the inside as well. I guess it was after attending a lecture done by Android Jones in the land of BOOM, a major festival in Portugal in 2008. The lecture included the Dreamcatcher project, an online dream-diary community with room for visual support that went online shortly after that summer.
Not that the world of dreams, psychedelics, and spirituality was new to me, not at all … but the Boomland does something to a man, especially the first time. Adittional to that being plunged into the world of psy-trance from the age of 20 really impacted me in such a positive way it helped to shape me into who I am today.

Influences and triggers

I was enormously lucky to have been able to grow up in a family where my spiritual search was triggered at the age of 12 and having constant support in my pursuit of happiness was the perfect compliment to the genes I inherited from my mother’s side. My great-grand-mother was a woman who had friends in the library enabling her to read spiritual books from the “black” list, a privilege we barely understand in the age of numerous self-help books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, now available in every bookshop around the corner.
I don’t want to dig too far into my reading journey but I can highlight some influential pieces.
It all started with several of my mother’s books including Erich von Däniken at the age of 12 and when I turned 16, Sophie’s World pushed me a little bit further. By my 18th revolution around the sun Carlos Castaneda, Lobsang Rampa and Richard Bach helped me to open another piece of the world on a completely different level. By then the tone was set and we all know the path that follows.
In a visual way - as a kid - I was totally triggered by the natural and colorful approach of Antoni Gaudi, the dark side of H.R. Giger, and the surreal world of Salvador Dali. The curly world of the Jugendstil and Art Nouveau also influenced me a lot. Later, I was inspired by Android Jones, Alex Grey, and numerous other psychedelic / visionary artists.

Dreams & Visions

Of course, even more important as an influence in why and what I create - try to express myself in this world - is the dreamworld. A world that sometimes feels like it’s on the inner side of my being … but at the same time feels like it surrounds me. Like all of us I guess I had dreams of the cosmos, interactions with monsters, extraterrestrials and inner-demons. Some of them really had a firm grip on my life, for example the one that truly jolted me with the power of lightning in kindergarten.
I was 4 years old and ill, a simple fever I think, but I had to lie on a stretcher. Maybe half awake … in that vision I found myself floating in space, total darkness, hearing voices speak to me, they felt like teachers from another world. No idea what they said, but my perception of time and space was so unbalanced to the extreme … it wrapped me in total fear. Everything kept speeding up and slowing down, sizes went from nano to macro, sound pitched from high to low, up and down, all happened really fast and slow at the same time.
That dream popped up once and awhile for at least 12 years.
Now i'd like to tell you about a dream, a true turning-point, because since the moment i woke up from this dream, i knew what i had to pursue .
This was a dream where i visit a wise old lady, who after asking her about self-healing, gave me 4 small plastic discs while a creature coated with a plumage consisting of the most beautiful and the most colorful kinds of feathers appeared right in front of me.

The Dream that opened a new path

“Self-Healing and The Bird of Paradise”

I guess i was strolling in a shopping mall with my girlfriend before entering what seemed to be a healers practitioners place in the first place, it was a clean but old looking room, kind of big, ...
It had dark wooden furniture, some bookshelves, a canapé, a salon table, a stand or closet with a glass compartment with books, and she - the practitioner, felt as if she was an acupuncturist of oriental origin, a wise lady and someone who was very present in the now - she watched us entering and exploring the space ...
I took a book in my hands, just out of interest while wandering around and thought about sitting down for reading it - in this what i thought was a place for waiting ( like in a doctor’s office ).
But the woman interrupted us and felt agitated, as if she needed a hello, like a " why are u guys entering ? " ...
Suddenly it felt like we invaded her personal space, her personal living room while touching her personal stuff, ... and she was waiting for us to ask a question or at least give a reason why we entered her place ...
I guess i started to look for a reason, because before, it was just as if we strolled / stumbled into that place and were just looking around ... like when u are shopping without any reason ... but since the shop or place felt like a healers room / shop / practitioners office all in once ... questions started to rise in me , ...
She really felt like a some sort eastern doctor, some sort of practitioner in the healing arts, with a lot of knowledge, but what caught my attention was that she was still agitated to the fact that it seemed as if we didn’t come up there with a purpose , or a question ...
So I thought of things or possible reasons but didn't ask her immediately ( mainly because they didn’t seem important enough )
But after a while , I did ask a question ...
The question I asked her , after getting the feeling she really needed a reason for us entering and touching her stuff was this : " What about self-healing ? "
She acted a bit surprised, suddenly off balance and i guess it was that exact moment when she showed us a gigantic Bird of Paradise, it was alive, 2 meter high and so a bit taller as a regular person, … It appeared somewhere random in the room as if coming out of a hidden door ... I told my girlfriend : “ Look ! “
“ Look a gigantic Bird of Paradise !! “
It was showing all of its beautiful feathers, all colors of the rainbow ... simply fantastic !
It was unbelievably gracious standing there, right in front of us, what a wonderful and unique being !
But the woman replied to the answer i asked her " What about self-healing " in a way i didn’t expect ... She said " I don't know about that " as if she had her doubts about the possible reality of that fact, as if she doubted that it was even possible …
Soon after that moment she gave me 4 round, disc-like objects, simple big coin sized, transparent plastic-like discs, i think it was a magenta, yellow and cyan ( and the fourth was one of the same of color or combination with one of those 3, but I don’t remember that well )
I left the dream with a good feeling , because i knew for myself that self-healing was possible , even though that woman had her doubts about it ...
No idea what to do with those plastic discs , but what a wonderful sight it was that big bird of paradise !
Every day since that morning “Natural Warp” woke up in a different reality .
Afterwards I realized that these 4 discs – that were colored in the 3 “ CMY “ and the fourth one” K”
( since black is not really a “color” in terms of light it was hard to “read" in the dreamworld ) – are in fact the colors that are used in printing .
So the step was over-obvious, the dream journal I had on the dreamcatcher website became my stepping-stone to not only turn the dreams i had at night into visual support for my logbook of the inner quest, but also turn my visions into artwork and acutally share them with the world.

Today

Now, in the year 2017 I would ask you this:
Have you ever stared into a field of grass for as long as you could without blinking during a summer day?
Well, if I do this, I’ve started to see beautiful patterns and a multitude of layers and fractals. I would recommend this to anyone since it is such an innocent and very meditative way to spend your time. To me it feels as if a constant waterfall of joy and pure liveliness that jumps out of the image, one that before I simply viewed as "the normal world.”
My latest work is the result of an attempt to translate these never-ending depths that are hiding mere millimeters behind the curtain of our everyday perception of reality. It is an attempt to build a bridge between any concept observable in this world and the unimaginable world of dreams behind it on the other side. To simulate a panorama over a landscape that stretches over countless of inter-dimensional facets of reality, a wonderful view we could only dream of to perceive.
It is an invitation to the mind of the observer to, even if for just a moment, feel the fractal nature of the now, to inspire awe for the multi-layered details whirling into the architecture of the moment, to try and connect with it’s deep design within and to dive into that overwhelming experience.
By flirting with basic geometry and mixing it into semi-controlled random brushstrokes I enable myself to spawn multiple shapes at once and arrange them onto hundreds of layers spread over thousands and thousands of pixels while pushing the limits of my machine.
You surely can imagine this makes me feel like I am playing with pure light and hyper-chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth or galaxy formation.