Chris, Saskia, Kai, and Ruth


Kai and Saskia in British Columbia


A gloomy self portrait 
(during a Toronto winter)

Meet 
Chris Van Es

I did not start to draw until I was in my early twenties while I attended university in Vancouver, British Columbia, with the vague intention of a career in medicine. One day, the doodle I had been absent mindedly drawing while supposedly paying attention to some fascinating aspect of  organic chemistry, was seen by an artist friend who gave it some merit and suggested that I follow this pursuit to a greater degree. About six months later, when it finally occurred to me that I did not have the desire, nor probably the strength required, to spend my life surrounded by sick people, I left for Tunesia for a change of climate and state of mind.

After a number of months where I sketched most days, and a two-day, utterly futile attempt to hitchhike through the Sahara desert from Tozeur to Algeria, I had had enough and went back to Amsterdam where I found work as a ramp handler at Schiphol airport and as bartender in a couple of places in the red light district where I lived. Much to my surprise, I continued the process of learning to draw until it dawned on me that this was something that made me far happier than anything had in my life up to that point.

I met my future wife, Ruth, while living in Amsterdam and after a brief return to Vancouver Island  to change my immigrant status to that of a Canadian citizen before the authorities would childishly refuse to let me live there because I was away most of the time, we travelled to South East Asia , Shri Lanka and India. It was near Aurangabad, where a man whom I had just sketched had  handed me two fistfuls of amethyst in return for my poor effort, that it occurred to me that it might actually be possible to make a living at something that I enjoyed this much.

With that in mind, after we returned and married, I studied fine art for a year at Malaspina College on Vancouver Island  after which we moved to Ontario where three years later I graduated from the illustration program at Sheridan College. 

My first job out of college was as an art director for a small ad agency which seemed further removed from what I wanted to do than loading airplanes in Amsterdam had been. After bravely grinning and bearing it for a year I gathered up the courage to go freelance while I kept body and soul united by slinging bad cocktails in a worse restaurant until illustration gradually picked up and I managed to get myself fired over a piece of cheese cake [cherry].

In 1991, a few months before my son Kai was born, we bought the work in progress that is our house in Toronto, for which I  had to slowly acquire a whole new set of skills in order to carry out the renovations that have been ongoing ever since. As a surprise encore my daughter Saskia was born in 1996.

Although I am better known for my black and white drawings and colourized black and white drawings (for which I have been given four SND awards), I work in another style as well. The illustrations seen on this page are in oils and have been published both in magazines and to a lesser extent in corporate brochures as well.

Born and raised in the Netherlands I grew up in a relatively enlightened democracy, which, by the time I left at age 16, had 54 distinct political parties. This not only created a life-long fascination with the designs of power, choice, and human nature, but laid the foundations that ultimately turned me into someone who can only be described as opinionated. Editorial illustration provides, if nothing else, a wonderful forum to get those opinions across.