Guillaume Vogels (1976) is a visual artist who nowadays mainly focuses on painting. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Tilburg where at that time he primarily worked on photography and sculpting. After a period of low artistic production in order to raise a young family he started creating works of art again.

When he started out painting he was inspired by the nearly abstract paintings by William Turner (1775-1851) in which land- and seascapes were shrouded in fog, mist and clouds. This inspiration made Guillaume paint many seascapes with which he explored the possibilities of oil paint. Eventually he decided to stop painting the seas and horizons and abruptly alter his canvases to abstract images with subtile colour nuances, contrasts between light and dark areas or hard and soft shapes. These abstract paintings are often built up by twenty or more layers of paint and explore the concept of transparency, light and the illusion of three-dimensional depth in a flat image. Every layer of paint has to dry before a new one can be added so it takes months before the paintings are finished. 

Besides the abstract paintings, Guillaume also works on a project about World War 1 inspired by his French great-grandfather who fought in the war, was severely injured but survived. This project contains landscapes, abstract paintings and objects. The landscape paintings display sombre and gloomy images with which he tries to evoke a reference to fields of war, destruction, atrocities committed by mankind. These paintings are also very layered, but the paint is put on thickly, and often combined with other materials, such as wood, rock, steel wire. 

Finally, as an opposite to the slow process of layered painting Guillaume also creates watercolours. These are mostly abstract works but sometimes hint towards little landscapes due to the way they turn out.