Vanessa Van Meerhaeghe is a visual artist based in Belgium, exploring bold, colorful, and intimate  compositions that reflect her passion for storytelling. Her journey began in the world of fashion design, where she spent 20 years designing collections, curating color palettes, and creating concepts for women’s fashion. Today, the love for vibrant hues, patterns, and storytelling finds a new home in her paintings, blending playful and introspective themes into dynamic works.

With this background in fashion design and illustration, her work is deeply influenced by contemporary fashion and art. Her paintings are bold, colorful, and playful, yet they explore contradictions—elegance mixed with irony, beauty intertwined with subtle critique. Vanessa loves working with patterns, often using them to create tension between structure and movement.

Her figures, mostly women, inhabit carefully staged settings where body language and small details hint at larger narratives. There’s often a quiet irony in their gestures, an ambiguous relationship between comfort and performance. Inspired by personal experiences, running trails, and everyday observations, her work reflects on societal expectations, self-image, and the absurdity of modern rituals.

Vanessa primarily works in oil and acrylics, building up layers of color and texture to create a sense of depth while maintaining a graphic, stylized quality. Whether through humor, fashion references, or unexpected compositions, her paintings invite viewers to engage with the contradictions they reveal.

Over time, her transition from fashion design to visual art has allowed her to develop a unique voice that merges the two worlds. Her artistic practice continues to evolve, and Vanessa sees her work as an ongoing conversation with herself and her audience—a process of discovery, reflection, and experimentation.