About Ben Vanderwerff
Painting for me is not a career choice — it’s survival. It’s the way I carry the weight of what I see in people: their decisions, their struggles, their relationships, their attempts to hold themselves together. When life presses down, I turn to the landscape, because it mirrors that same tension and resilience.
I paint outdoors because I need the landscape to push back on me. My process is not about comfort or studio control — it’s about exposure. I camp for days in the mountains or along rivers, living simply out of my vehicle, letting the weather, silence, and isolation shape how the work unfolds. The act of painting becomes inseparable from the act of being alive in that place.
The materials I use — spray paint and acrylics — give me immediacy. They let me move fast, force decisions, and work at the scale that matches how I feel standing inside the environment. Each painting is built under shifting skies and changing light, layered with the messiness of real conditions. These imperfections matter; they’re what makes the painting breathe.
What I’m after is not a picture of a place, but a presence — something that carries the energy of being within it. My paintings are records of that immersion: part wilderness, part human experience, part survival. They are how I process the world, and how I give it back..
Ben Vanderwerff is a plein air painter based in Washington’s Skagit Valley. Working with spray paint and acrylics, he creates large-scale works outdoors in the rivers, forests, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. His paintings have been exhibited across Washington State and in the Baja Mexico region, where his immersive, nomadic approach to painting has become central to his practice.