Renata Hamsikova: From Field to Canvas

Buying an original painting from an artist is often a very different experience from ordering a print from an online shop. This is certainly true of Renata Hamsikova, whose website presents her paintings less as commercial products and more as individual works that emerge from a personal and intuitive artistic process.

How do you buy a painting?

The Field section of Renata Hamsikova’s website is not an ordinary online shop. There is no catalogue in which you simply select a painting, add it to a shopping basket and pay online. Instead, the website introduces the ideas behind her work and leads visitors towards the paintings themselves.

Her current website makes an important distinction between paintings that remain with the artist, works already held in private collections and paintings that are available. She also emphasises that seeing an original painting in person is very different from seeing it on a screen: the size, texture, layers of paint and physical presence become part of the experience. Her studio is in Zwaag, in the Netherlands, and visitors can make an appointment to see the work.

So, if you see a painting on the website that appeals to you, the process is essentially personal contact with the artist rather than an online checkout. For individual works, the website may give the dimensions, year and technique, while the price can be available on request. For example, The Woods of My Childhood is a 200 × 180 cm oil painting from 2025, with the price listed as available on request. Interested buyers are invited to contact Renata directly.

This also means that you are generally looking at an existing original painting, rather than ordering a painting that will automatically be created for you.

There is an important nuance here. I could not find evidence on the current website that Renata offers a standardised commission service in which a customer chooses colours, size or subject and then has a completely new painting produced to order. Her description of her artistic process actually points in the opposite direction: she says that she begins a painting without knowing what it will become, allowing the work to develop through observation, intuition, colour, movement and material.

That makes the relationship between artist and buyer rather different from commissioning a decorative painting for a particular interior. If you are interested in a specific existing work, the sensible route is to contact Renata and discuss its availability and the practical details of purchasing it.

Who is Renata Hamsikova?

Renata Hamsikova was born in Bojkovice in the Czech Republic, in the White Carpathians. Her childhood landscape has remained an important part of her artistic identity. In one of her recent works, Where My Homeland Is, she returns explicitly to the landscape around Bojkovice and the forests where she grew up. Another painting, The Woods of My Childhood, depicts a forest path from her childhood.

Her background is particularly interesting because she did not simply emerge from a conventional art-school career. She grew up in Czechoslovakia during the communist era, in a family that she describes as independent-minded and resistant to conformity. Her father founded an international motorcycle club, while her mother held management positions and refused to join the Communist Party. Hamsikova has described this upbringing as giving her a strong sense of mental freedom and independence.

At the age of 19, she moved from the Czech Republic to the Netherlands. The move became an important part of her personal development, although her connection with the landscape and memories of her childhood has remained visible in her later work.

Today, she lives and works in the Netherlands. Her studio is in Zwaag, North Holland, where she also receives visitors by appointment.

Did she study art?

Interestingly, I could not find reliable evidence that Hamsikova followed a conventional fine-art degree or graduated from an art academy. That is worth mentioning because her biography is sometimes easy to interpret as that of a traditionally trained professional artist, while the available information does not establish such an education.

She has, however, pursued other forms of higher education and professional training. Most notably, she completed the ECHA Specialist in Gifted Education programme at Radboud University in Nijmegen and has worked for many years as a specialist and coach in exceptional giftedness.

Art appears to have developed alongside this professional career rather than simply following an academic route through an art institution.

Photography was an especially early part of her creative life. According to an extensive profile about her, she learned photography from her father and was already selling photographs to magazines at the age of 15. Later, photography, writing and eventually painting became increasingly important forms of expression.

This helps explain why her artistic practice today extends beyond painting. Her website presents canvas, imagery, objects and words as different aspects of the same creative world. She works not only with oil paint but also with photography, writing and pottery.

Painting as an intuitive process

The most distinctive aspect of Hamsikova’s work may be the way she describes the actual act of painting.

She does not approach a canvas simply as a surface on which a predetermined picture has to be reproduced. Instead, she describes entering the process without knowing exactly what the painting will become. She adds paint, removes it, waits and responds to what develops on the canvas. A colour or movement can change the entire direction of the work.

Her current work revolves around ideas such as nature, consciousness, the cosmos, matter and the invisible connections between them. The website’s Field section describes her painting as taking place at the boundary between the invisible and the physical.

The paintings therefore sit somewhere between abstraction and landscape. Some works contain recognisable elements of forests, fields or natural forms, while others move much further towards colour, structure, movement and what might be described as an imagined cosmic landscape.

Her recent work also shows an increasing interest in physics and ideas surrounding quantum mechanics. However, the paintings are not intended as scientific illustrations. Rather, scientific concepts provide part of the intellectual and philosophical territory from which she works.

More than simply buying a painting

This makes buying an original from Hamsikova a rather personal process. You are not simply choosing an image to match a sofa or a particular colour scheme. The artist herself suggests that the right painting is the one with which you experience a genuine connection.

Her earlier presentation of the work put this particularly clearly: she describes her paintings as stories and suggests that when someone feels a strong attraction to a particular painting, that painting may be the one that belongs with them. She consequently encourages potential buyers to visit the studio rather than making a decision based solely on photographs online.

For someone seriously considering an original, a studio visit therefore makes sense. You can see the actual scale of the work, look closely at the paint and surface, and discuss the painting directly with the artist. Some works may be available while others have already entered private collections or remain part of Hamsikova’s own collection.

In that sense, the website is less a conventional art shop than an invitation into the artist’s world. The Field section introduces the philosophy behind the work, the Canvas section shows how she thinks about painting, and the studio provides the physical place where the works can actually be encountered.

For anyone interested in purchasing one of her paintings, the best starting point is therefore not a shopping basket, but the painting itself: find a work that genuinely speaks to you, contact the artist, and arrange a conversation or studio visit. The purchase follows from that encounter rather than the other way around.