GIDJA was born and currently lives in Belgium, where’s he’s a practicing osteopath. In many ways, his professional life mirrors his artistic practice: understanding connections and inspiring people to see things in a new way.

Abstract painter GIDJA is known for both his soft, saturated watercolors and precise, colorful dot paintings. While these two painting styles may seem in opposition to one another, they are connected through GIDJA’s primary sources of inspiration: nature and spirituality. Whether he’s working with watercolors or painstakingly creating dotted patterns with a feather or twig, GIDJA approaches painting as an act of meditation, letting the paint and colors guide him. He creates without a plan, operating on pure instinct and emotion. While his watercolors are typically pure abstraction, his dot paintings have a more narrative sensibility, and are populated with animals, people, symbols, spirits, and objects. GIDJA favors the dot painting technique because of its connections to indigenous cultures, which he admires for their understanding of spirituality and ecology. It's a simple process but one that requires a great amount of patience.