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Interview 2026

with womanartsnetwork

At Women in Arts Network, we’ve noticed something beautiful about certain artists. The ones whose work feels the richest, the most alive, are often people who took the long way around. Who spent years building careers in completely different fields before ever picking up a brush seriously. And somehow, all those years aren’t wasted. They’re right there in the work, adding depth most artists never access.

For our Birds exhibition, we were looking for artists who got what birds actually represent beyond just being pretty creatures to paint. Birds move through space in ways we can’t. They experience freedom of movement that humans need machines for. They navigate three dimensions while we’re stuck on surfaces. That’s what we wanted to see captured, not technically perfect feathers, but that sense of what it means to move through the world unbound.

Among the artists we selected, Gitta Pardoel’s work made us pause and look closer because there’s something different about how she sees space. Even when she’s working small, with just watercolor on paper, you can feel decades of thinking about how environments actually function. How spaces hold memory. How living things create atmosphere just by existing in certain arrangements. That understanding doesn’t come from art classes alone. That comes from someone who spent real years designing actual gardens and buildings before ever focusing on making images of them.
We chose Gitta because her work shows what happens when you bring everything you’ve learned from one life into another. She’s not just painting birds and flowers because they’re beautiful. She’s thinking about how they organize the space around them, how they make you feel something just by how they’re positioned, how a garden you visited years ago can live more vividly in memory than the house you’re standing in right now.

Before we hear from Gitta, here’s what makes her journey so compelling and why her work feels different from most nature art we see.

She studied architecture at Delft Technical University. Then she studied art at Utrecht and Leicester. That’s someone who wasn’t content with just one way of understanding how to shape the world. She wanted to know how to build actual three-dimensional spaces that people move through, and she wanted to know how to create two-dimensional images that make people feel something. Both. Not one or the other.

For years, she designed gardens professionally. Real gardens that people walked through and lived with. Later she specialized in ecological garden design and even taught it to others. Those weren’t wasted years away from “real art.” Those were years learning something most painters never understand: how to shape space with living materials. How to use color the way it actually appears in wild growth, not the way color theory says it should work. How to create environments that feel specific ways through careful choices about what goes where.

Birds show up everywhere in her work, and it’s not random. She sees them as the creatures that move the way she wishes humans could. Free in three dimensions. Not stuck on the ground. They navigate space the way we can only dream about without technology. That’s not just admiration for pretty animals. That’s understanding what they represent about freedom and movement and being unbound.

She works mainly with watercolor and watercolor pencils, sometimes mixing in ink or collage or acrylic when a piece asks for it. She does both commissioned illustration for nature organizations and children’s books, and her own independent work exploring what she calls flowers in spaces. The commissions give her clear direction, they tell her what to paint and she figures out how to make it hers. The personal work lets her keep investigating the question she’s been asking her whole career: how do spaces feel, and how do living things create those feelings?

Poetry matters to her too. She writes alongside making images because sometimes words say what pictures can’t, and when both come together right, they create something neither could alone. That comfort moving between different ways of expressing things comes from years of teaching creative process to students. Having to explain to other people how experimentation actually works, how you find courage to try things, how you see possibilities in what you make, all of that teaching made her own process clearer. Made her braver about not knowing where things will go before she starts.

What’s moving about her story is how the question stayed the same even as everything else changed. She’s always been asking: how do spaces hold memory? How do they make you feel things? How does arranging living materials create atmosphere? She just asked it through architecture first, then garden design, then teaching, and now through painting and poetry. The question never changed. The way she explores it keeps evolving.

Now let’s hear from Gitta about what happens when everything you learned in one career becomes the foundation for another, and why sometimes the bravest thing you can do is let go of what’s working to reach for what’s calling you.
Wrapping up with Gitta, I keep coming back to something that most people completely miss about career changes.

We talk about them like they’re failures. Like spending years in architecture or garden design before becoming a full-time artist means you wasted time, took wrong turns, didn’t know what you wanted. We treat every shift as evidence of confusion or lack of commitment.

But look at what Gitta’s work actually does that most nature painters can’t. She doesn’t just paint birds sitting on branches or flowers arranged prettily. She paints space itself. The way a garden holds memory. The way birds move through three dimensions while we’re stuck on flat ground. The way living materials create atmosphere that lingers long after the actual place is gone.

That understanding didn’t come from art school. It came from decades of literally building three-dimensional environments, of shaping how people experience space with actual gardens and structures, of teaching others how living materials create feeling. Those weren’t years away from art. Those were years learning a language most painters never access.

Here’s what strikes me about artists who take the long route. They’re not confused. They’re gathering vocabularies. Every seemingly unrelated career is teaching them another way to see, another framework for understanding how things work. And when they finally focus all of that accumulated knowledge on making art, the work carries depth that going straight to painting school never would have provided.

Gitta spent years learning how spaces hold memory through architecture. How color functions in actual growth patterns through garden design. How courage and experimentation develop through teaching creative process. None of that was preparation for art. It was art, just in different forms. And now when she works on paper, all of that shows up in ways she probably doesn’t even consciously recognize.

If you’ve built something substantial in one field and feel pulled toward something else, here’s what her work proves. You’re not abandoning what you built. You’re taking every skill, every way of seeing, every hard-won understanding and redirecting it. The foundation stays. You’re just constructing something different on top of it.

And that thing you’re worried about, that you’ve already invested so many years in the wrong direction? Those years aren’t wrong. They’re giving you perspective and understanding that will make whatever you do next deeper and more interesting than it could have been otherwise. The detours are often what matter most.

Follow Gitta from the links below to see what decades of spatial thinking look like when they meet devotion to nature, and proof that the bravest thing you can do is trust that everything you’ve learned matters, even when you can’t yet see how.

https://womeninartsnetwork.com/gitta-pardoel-let-go-of-her-career-for-art/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRUoMZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFuWDJRV1NMTVdCSGNUR0I2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHhxb6RMqkR319oqpbfRDyFNw3XkAP05li3Vu9ZLPCZ4rCDvgf8uVViWc1hFR_aem_uIYaTVsbKI1yJ7Goshm4wg

artsymposium Hammamet, Tunesie, 2026

discovering my flower gardens

Again a beautiful exhibition in Tunesie inspite of the weather and the floods. What an inspiring experience it was to present my work at the Ensemble Symposium in Hammamet, and to share my artistic journey with the ambassadors of Iraq and Jordan. My work is deeply rooted in the language of nature—each piece is a dialogue between abstraction and detail, where the forms of leaves, plants, and birds emerge and dissolve, much like memories or fleeting moments in a landscape.

During our conversation, I explained how my art seeks to capture the quiet poetry of the natural world, inviting viewers to look closer and discover the layers of meaning and emotion within. It was a privilege to discuss how, through color, texture, and form, I aim to bridge cultures and perspectives, celebrating the universal beauty found in nature.

Thank you to everyone who made this exchange possible. Moments like these remind me of the power of art to connect us across borders and backgrounds.

School boards about the seizing, 2024

IVN 2024

For IVN, a nature education foundation in the Netherlands I am illustrating 4 very big size school billboards about the seasons. And I made the illustrations with a story about the change of climate and the implications for some of the animals.

If you and your school want also these billboards for your playground? You can get them at; https://www.ivn.nl

News

symposium Hammamet Tunesia 2024

Art symposium Ensemble Tunesia

News

Newspaper published 2024

My work published in a very good newspaper; de Volkskrant

Virtual exhibition Bologna, 2025

childrensbook art fair 2025

Assignment for IVN

IVN 2024

For IVN, a nature education foundation in the Netherlands I have illustrated  for their magazine, the great story of the climate change and the impact on animals.

assignement for IVN

IVN 2024

For IVN, a nature education foundation in the Netherlands I have illustrated  for their magazine, the natural farming landscape with their animals.

publication 2024

land van ons 2024

illustrations for a little booklet about all the little creatures in farming land

exhibition childrensbookmuseum 2023

the Hague

with 9 other illustrators we had an exhibition in the childrensbook museum, at the end of our masters illustrating children books.

Artsymposium Hammamet, Tunesien 2022

Symposium with 40 chosen artist in Hammamet, Tunisia, with exhibition.

Event, 2022

present my childrensbook MusjesHuis in the library of the Hgue 2022

MusjesHuiss, 
Sparrowshouse, about the little sparrow trying to find a house

publication

land van ons 2024

The 5 important creatures in the landscape of land van ons, 

News

exhibition in the childrenbookmuseum in the Hague

with 9 other illustrators we had an exhibition in the childrensbook museum, at the end of our masters illustrating children books.

News

symposium in Tunesia

Symposium with 40 chosen artist in Hammamet, Tunisia, with exhibition.

design

finished my childrensbook 2022

Oli and Koer, about the friendship between a little elephant and a bird, how they help each other with their difficult problems, about loosing your home, loosing your grandma…….

design

finished my childrensbook 2022

Tos, about the life of an albatros, an endangered species, in leporello form with poetry

publication

poem and illustration published in an international poetry platform 2021

artsymposium and exhibition in museum, Xi’An 2020

China 2020

International art symposium and exhibition in the museum of art, Xi'An

publication childrensbook

published my first childrensbook 2019

MusjesHuiss, 
Sparrowshouse, about the little sparrow trying to find a house

exhibition

exhibition germany 2016

Exhibition

exhibition kunstschouw the Netherlands 2016

Exhibition

exhibition Italy 2016