Ad van den Boom

Ad van den Boom is a painter based in the Netherlands and Switzerland who works with trees as the central subject of his practice. He gives trees a voice in his paintings by exploring what they reveal about movement, change, and the traces of time. Like humans, trees respond to their environment, and in his work he attempts to make visible what often goes unnoticed.

Van den Boom calls his approach crealism—a way of seeing where reality is not fixed but emerges through the attention with which we look. He believes that what we see is never just what is, but also what we recognize in it. His paintings develop slowly and organically, sometimes requiring hundreds of hours of work. Thousands of dots and layers build up to form images that grow from the inside out, much like trees themselves. In addition to large-scale paintings, he creates smaller works and black-and-white drawings constructed from dots, lines, and signs.

After years of working on commission, van den Boom chose to focus entirely on his own work. He exhibits his paintings in galleries, exhibitions, and art fairs. In his practice, image, word, and silence come together to create space for other ways of seeing.