Today we’d like to introduce you to Roy Kerckhoffs
Hi Roy, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My artistic journey began in the Netherlands in 1973 as the visual world captivated me. My father nurtured this passion by teaching me to draw at a young age. Pencil drawings and some early gouache paintings – I still have them all – became my first artistic language. Around the age of 10, a new fascination emerged – photography – when my parents surprised me with a small point-and-shoot camera.
While the allure of art school was strong at 12, my parents encouraged a high school that prepped for university, which I embraced thanks to my interest in science as well. This path ultimately led to a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, followed by a PhD in Biomedical Engineering – from Eindhoven University of Technology. The chance to apply mechanical principles to the human body captivated me.
During my PhD I went on local photography trips with a friend in which we photographed sites among others that were painted by Van Gogh. With my Nikon film camera I captured both black and white photographs, and vivid Fuji Velvia 50 slides.
I came here to start post-doctoral training at the University of California San Diego for two or three years after I received my PhD. One of the requirements of becoming a university professor in the Netherlands is to perform research for at least a year in another country. Plus, I thought, San Diego doesn’t sound too bad to perform research at the Bioengineering Department of UCSD. Although I had visited the USA a couple of times before, I had not yet had the pleasure to visit California. It was, to some extent, a leap into the unknown.
A couple of months after I arrived in San Diego, I decided I was going to follow my scientific career in the USA. I went from postdoc to project scientist to research scientist at UCSD, but I also still loved photography. So in 2008 I founded “Eyeball Photography” with my wife Marie (who was born and raised in San Diego; we got married in 2007).
In 2010 I attended an art festival for the first time, Mission Federal ArtWalk in Little Italy in San Diego and in 2012, I started experimenting with hand coloring – or hand tinting – my black and white photographs with oils. My “Tower #3”, taken at Torrey Pines State Beach, was one of my first successful hand colored photos that sold. Hand coloring is a technique from the early days of photography when people were looking for ways to add color to black and white photographs.
My work was selling, so I took part in more art shows and street fairs. This led to some large projects, the first one being Cape Rey – a Hilton resort in Carlsbad – which bought over 400 of my photos to decorate the guest rooms. Galleries and stores also started to represent me.
Now things were getting a little busier. I was a scientist mostly during the week and worked on my art on the weekends. My wife and I came up with a plan: see how my art sales increase and if we reach a certain tipping point, I’d quit science and go full-time with my own business. That point was reached in 2014. I quit UCSD, changed my business name to “Roy Kerckhoffs Art” and we moved from Normal Heights in San Diego to North County.
I opened a 1600 square feet studio in Carlsbad, and started printing my own work with a large-format printer and bought all the equipment to also do my own framing, which I still do till this day.
In 2017 and later in 2022, I published a coffee table book (first and second edition, respectively) with all my hand colored photos that I took in Encinitas, CA. The second edition contains two chapters with tutorials on hand coloring black and white photos with pastels and oils.
Because the rent was getting to high, I started working from home in 2019. In 2022, I bought a drone and became Part 107 certified (commercial drone operator), which expands my capabilities to capture images from new perspectives.
To keep challenging myself, I also started taking landscape and portrait oil painting lessons at the Watts Atelier in Encinitas.
I’m excited and looking forward to be the featured artist at the La Jolla Art and Wine Festival which takes place September 28th and 29th in downtown La Jolla, CA.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Believe it or not, but in the Netherlands you get to choose which direction you’d like to go education-wise after sixth grade. As I pursued a scientific career, sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I would have gone to that art school. For sure I wouldn’t have ended up in San Diego because it was science that brought me here.
At some point things were getting very busy as I was a scientist during the week and worked on my art on the weekends and was also taking part in art shows.. I remember picking up and dropping off artwork at a framer during lunch hours and thinking “Could I go full-time with my artwork?”.
Then, COVID happened. In March 2020 all schools went online. My wife closed her out-of-the-home office and now all three of us were working and learning from home. The next school year approached and my wife and I decided to homeschool our daughter for 6th grade, which went better than expected.
At the beginning of April 2020 – after California’s COVID lock down, the Carlsbad-by-the-Sea resort contacted me for artwork in their guest rooms. And even though I had all the equipment to do my own framing, for large jobs I still had help from my framer, but his business was also closed. Plus, I wasn’t sure if I could get all the materials. To check if I could do it all on my own I put one piece together and calculated it would take me about a month to do it all. And even though my molding vendors were also shut down, I was still allowed to pick up the materials at their locations. Each week I’d create and deliver about 30 pieces of artwork and was very happy I finished the project successfully.
As I’m taking part in fewer art shows since COVID, I’m putting more of my work on Fine Art America. I signed up in 2020, but only this year I started adding more work there. But here it is a matter of how people will find you as there are millions of artists there, so we will see how that goes.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
In my work I invite viewers to explore the stories hidden within historic locations. Bold textures etched by time hold a fascination for me, as they put emphasis on bygone eras. I find beauty in the contrast between weathered human creations – wooden structures, weathered concrete, and rusting steel – juxtaposed with the soft, organic forms of nature. I draw most inspiration from industrial objects, ghost towns and coastal themes with an element of human origin in it. Human-made objects that are aging will show lots of texture and contrast; what’s more, because these objects have been around for a while, there are so many possible stories that are linked to these objects and the scenes that they exist in.
To convey a story I create high-contrast black and white photographs and hand tint the photographs with either pastels, acrylics, oils, or a combination of them. In the early days of photography, people used to hand tint black and white photographs with transparent oils. More recently, I experimented with other media and now I also apply acrylics and oils to black and white photos on canvas – either thinned to stains or as opaque colors. There are not many artists who do this professionally.
I acquire my black and white photos on chemically-developed photo paper from a local lab. Whenever I can I try to do everything else myself in-house: creating color prints; printing on canvas; stretching canvas; mounting photos; coloring photos; cutting frame molding; assembling frames; fitting art into frames. I number almost all my pieces, including originally hand tinted photographs as they include a black and white photograph.
I like to experiment with different media. Since more than a year I have been taking portrait and landscape oil painting lessons at the Watts Atelier in Encinitas, CA. Furthermore, I have been experimenting with resin which I use either as a coating on my work; made my own custom frames with resin and have created bas-reliefs that I paint with oils or acrylics. I also started taking up digital painting.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
YouTube is a large resource where you can learn a lot. I also have my own channel on which I show how to hand tint black and white photographs. I have a lot of books on art history, hand tinting (including a book from the 1950s, written by Lucile Robertson Marshall, the original creator of Marshall Photo Oils), design, anatomy, artist biographies and their works.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://roykart.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/roy_kerckhoffs_art
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/eyeballphotography
- Twitter: https://x.com/KerckhoffsRoy
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RoyKerckhoffsArt
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/roy-kerckhoffs-art-carlsbad
- Other: https://roy-kerckhoffs.pixels.com/
