Artist Bio
how it started
Meet Tessa
Tessa de Guytenaer is a visual artist whose work is deeply rooted in a lifetime of making. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) in 2007 with a degree in Textile Design, she spent over 15 years working across the fashion world — from collaborative design projects to running her own textile print studio. Through those years she cultivated an intuitive mastery of color, texture, and composition, always guided by a curiosity about how material and emotion intertwine.
Her work explores the subtleties of mood, memory, and presence. It is guided by a sense of openness, where brushstrokes and layers form a language of sensation rather than narrative. The result is a body of work that resonates as much with quiet introspection as with bold looking — art that invites you in, then leaves space for your own imagination.
From Designer to artist
The Shift
Over time, a powerful creative shift emerged: a call to make work beyond fabric, to create pieces that live on the wall and invite sustained feeling rather than explanation. Tessa’s art translates sensations that words can barely touch — intuitive moments, lived experience, inner landscapes — into visual form. Her practice thrives in the space between abstraction and emotion, where each piece becomes a place to experience feeling without needing to define it.
studio by the sea
Today
Today Tessa's main focus is her autonomous art and custom made pieces. With her design studio Saltbox, she still works with a small selection of lifestyle brands to help bring their print stories to life.
Tessa creates from a light studio space near the beach in Scheveningen, the Netherlands.