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Visual artist, Antwerp, Belgium, 1980

Nils Verkaeren creates modern gestural landscapes, often during intensive periods painting en plein air. Verkaeren earned a master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He has traveled around the world to create his work, to locations such as the Drowned Land of Saeftinghe (a marsh in Zeeland, Netherlands) and the Forest of Tronçais in France. He has also undertaken arduous journeys, including a more-than-7,000-mile trek across Argentina and an expedition to an abandoned coffee plantation in Colombia, where he worked in complete isolation. The artist moves between working with oil paint on large canvases and smaller panels. Inspired by sources such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, his paintings revere a natural world in crisis. Verkaeren’s work has been described as a warning without slogans and a call for reflection.