Inspiration & style
I’m inspired by a lot of mid-century art and design, anything colorful, nature, my travels and my fellow artists’ work.
I always find it hard to define my style but recently a friend called it contemporary retro and I like that description a lot.
At the moment my main focus is on making art that’s suitable for greeting cards, wall art, children’s books, … And I sometimes create patterns too. I love creating animal characters and drawing all sorts of plants and flowers. I also incorporate a lot of hand lettering in my work. A lot of my work is geared towards kids and the young at heart.
WHY THE NAME ZESTI?
‘ZESTI means with great enthusiasm and energy, having zest for life and I hope those qualities are visible in my work and life.
I started using ‘Zesti because I wanted to use a name that was easy to pronounce for everybody. Lately I’ve been using my own name more and more too.
Studio
For the biggest part of the year I live and work in Antwerp, Belgium. I love my city, through out centuries it’s been a home to many creative people and to this day it is buzzing with artistic activity.
I have a little studio in my apartment with a relatively basic set up – old iMac which serves as a big screen for my MacBook Air, Wacom drawing tablet, iPad Pro, sketch books, pens, pencils and paints, printer, scanner, camera, …
For a small part of the year, usually during the cold winter months I like to travel to warmer and more exotic regions. One of my favourite places to stay in those dark winter months is the sleepy town of Nong Khai along the banks of the Mekong river in the north east of Thailand.
My set up while traveling is even more basic – laptop, iPad Pro, phone camera, pencils and pens and sketchbook.
MY CLIENTS
I have worked with:
Design House Greetings
Up With Paper
Hallmark
American Greetings
CSS Industries
Garven LLC
Robert Kaufman Fabrics
Little Miss Marmelade
Jelly The Pug
Oh My Party
Veritas (Belgium)
Kersenpitje (Belgium)
Kjekk & Søt (Norway)
Alles Fuer Selbermacher (Germany)
Craftizen (Korea)
…
TRADESHOWS
Visit me at BLUEPRINT in New York!
BluePrint Show 2, 404 10th Av., New York,
20-23nd May 2019
FOREST FOUNDRY
Together with 7 of my closest artist friends we started an art collective called Forest Foundry in 2013. We’ve exhibited together at Surtex in New York twice and even though we don’t have any plans to exhibit together again in the near future we still remain very close and give each other advice on how to handle everything concerning illustration, surface pattern design and anything really.