About the Artist

Edo Fuijkschot has been drawing his whole life tramping the globe like some traveling bard, working as a freelance illustrator on comic and children’s books, and as an animator on four continents. It is only in recent years during these wanderings, when he stubbed his toe on a book about Atelier art, that he discovered the wonderful world of Classical Realism and completely changed his art direction.  

Starting his life on Earth below sea level with only a wooden pencil to keep him afloat, the Netherlands in the mid 1970’s was a country obsessed with comic books. From here he drew his earliest artistic inspriration by flipping through countless pages of “the ninth art”. 

Moving to latitudes further down-under, the artist found comics sorely lacking in this new extraordinary place, and set to change Australia by illustrating his own. It was around this time that his love for studying the figure emerged. 

To get the inky ballpoint rolling Edo studied Graphic Design at Swinburne Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, Ausltralia. One day, wandering the back alleys nearby, he stumbled across Australian children’s book illustrator Peter Viska, and walked straight into an 8 year career in the animation industry, including working on the hit animated series Lil’ Elvis and the Truckstoppers for the ABC network. 

The artist has since embarked on a more global perspective in what has become a twenty-plus year sojourn around the Earth. It was somewhere along this global circuit when he started to give workshops that the artist opened the first pages of the book that opened the world of Classical Art and all it had to teach. It was time for the artist to lock down and learn what he had discovered. 

And it was exactly during the lock-down the artist hit upon the online core program at Samsara Academy of Art (based in India) under the tuition of Ayuesh Agarwal, where he rigorously followed the academic process customarily taught in full-time ateliers. 

Having completed his academic studies, Edo has returned to his country of origin, the Netherlands, where he currently teaches the Figure Drawing trimester courses at the Dutch Atelier of Realist Art in Haarlem. 

Enjoy!