Below you can read how I started painting and followed the flow of my heart.
If you would like to view a painting, please contact me to visit my studio by appointment.
My paintings are available for sale, but I do not sell them online - only through personal connection and by appointment. If you’re interested, please reach out and send me an email:
Period 1: 2002 - 2007 realistic oil paintings
My work as an autonomous and self-taught artist began in January 2002 with a dream. We had just moved and after the birth of our second child, I was not feeling very well. I yearned to listen more to my heart and one day I decided to quit my regular job at a logistics consulting firm and follow my feelings.... One of the first nights, just after I quit, I had a lucid dream. I dreamed that I was painting and in the dream I was born again. I woke up and thought: painting!
Painting was the spatial step I took to reshape my life and it changed my life. A new door opened. In the living room, among the children playing, I began to paint with oils on linen. Often I went into nature, together with the children, or alone. In nature I found the peace, tranquility and inspiration I was looking for.
Niels, my beloved husband, helped me stretch the linen so I could make the desired size for every painting. A few months after I started Niels made a small studio for me in our shed, there I could work in silence. In this studio and outside in nature, I made most of the oil paintings of this period.
Copyright voor mijn schilderijen is wereldwijd geregistreerd bij U.S. Copyright Office
Realistische en abstracte Kunst van Marieke Krista Engelbregt
Period 2 until 2011-12: Energy flows
I had made a habit of meditating for a moment in the evening before going to bed. That way I learned to let go of the day and fall asleep wonderfully. One evening in October (2005), while meditating, I received an inner call from a woman. Her energy image emerged clearly in a heavenly blue light and she invited me to come and visit her. There was not a moment of doubt in me. That very moment in the night I decided to go looking for her.
It took several months before I actually traveled with a friend and after an extraordinary search I found her. She was a Tibetan Buddhist nun in Nepal, Kathmandu. It was actually a short encounter and she initiated me and touched me on my third eye. I was in awe and touched in the depths of my being. A white-gold glow passed through my body, permeating and enveloping everything. A completely new experience of my spiritual, physical and emotional world within my perception into the Divine essence of Light opened up.
Slowly, this renewal began to integrate into my daily life ... and I began to express my feelings in a different way through painting. This brought me again and again into deep silence, peace. I no longer felt so attached to external realistic forms. I wanted this period to paint directly from my feelings what I was experiencing internally at a deeper level. I became more detached from thinking ... I began to paint the first intuitive paintings with oil paint, but became hypersensitive to the solvents of oil paint and that made me switch to acrylic paint. The abstract forms allowed me to merge harmoniously with the flow.
During this period, I got to know my fully realized Yoga Master Prema Baba Swamiji. Through His reaching hand I was able to further develop and deepen my connection with the Light and the Divine. This period thereby brought the space to the forefront of the possibilities, the expansion that we as humans can experience in the essence of Light. How matter can start to move and resonate and how that brings the inner movement into our bodies.
When we gain spiritual insights and grow inwardly, the body also moves to a higher energy level, which sometimes causes over-stimulation and requires temporary adjustments in, for example, nutrition due to sensitive digestion. Sometimes old layers of emotions were released, which I had to process. Step by step the inner fire of cellular burning grew to a higher level, and then everything came back into balance. This does not always happen automatically. Again and again it was a search and a discovery....
There were also times when I struggled to understand how we live, as if we were, "trapped in illusion on Earth".... But through meditation I began to experience that my soul-roots became deeper, as if I began to grow like a tree, with solid full branches. But still sometimes I felt overwhelmed by emotions, by the violence in this world, by sadness and fear.
As a child, I loved to play outside. I preferred to sit in the old chestnut tree near our house, where no one could see me. Now I began to connect intuitively with trees again, to meditate by trees or climb on a low branch and become totally absorbed in the feeling of the tree and experience peace. I meditate often in nature, to I feel space to turn deeper inward and analyze my thoughts and allow deeper transformations. For me, it was (and is) a way to allow the unconditional power, beauty and energy of nature to help me deal with the pressures of daily life, to turn inside and feel peace. I painted the painting shown below in 2010 to express all these feelings (1.22 x1.54m).
The painting has two sides: on one side my feelings and thoughts speak about the flow of creation, about sexuality, receiving and letting go, earthly matter, the duality between masculine and feminine; and on the other side I depict my strengths to stand tall and experience being like a tree. In the radiant Light of the Sun my roots grow deeper and deeper. Just as long and deep until I experience the nurturing of the Earth and can perceive, forgive, deeper accept and let go of painful experiences... In this deep cherishing moment, cosmic consciousness opens, emotions disappear like snow for the Sun and duality comes to oneness, to the unity of Light and Love.
Copyright for my paintings is registered worldwide with U.S. Copyright Office
Realistische en abstracte Kunst van Marieke Krista Engelbregt
Period 3 until 2017 Ananda, Inner Light and Happiness
The children grew older and there was more and more space to paint. My paintings grew along with my experience of Light, and I received inspirations to express my experiences of energy in new ways. Although Prema Baba was more in the background during this period, His energy, and the insights I had received from Him, continued to play a major role for me and my paintings. I had been initiated into the Kriya Yoga of Paramahansa Yogananda, and I spent a lot of time integrating the teachings into my life. Free abstract expression allowed me to express the inner joy I felt in my heart and in meditation. Feelings for which there are no words. The paintings pictured at this time are part of the Ananda series, which means “greatest joy,” “inner divine happiness,” or a word more common in English, “Bliss.".
The energy patterns in points and colors represent movements and feelings of expansion. I experienced a deepening in looking at myself, at the world. I began to experience more deeply the connection of oneness between inner and outer and with that the inner flows and power of movement in waves of energy.
The painting below is called "Inexhaustible Source."
The painting is from 2014 and, like all my paintings, I made it freehand.
It is 1.22m wide and 1.19m high.
During this period of painting, after a vision at Lake Siskiyou in Mount Shasta, I also got to know Mother Amma. Mata Amritananda Mayi Devi. Mother Amma, with her great compassion and example, helped me in my spiritual process of forgiveness, learn to turn deeper inward, resolving old emotions, and She revived the fire in my digestion.
Everything I learned is internalizing and deepening. I am beginning to perceive a deeper divine connection and perceive the cosmic layers in energy, color and radiance more clearly. In the series below I started giving expression to the initiations I received from Prema Baba, and the deepening in my process by Yogananda and Mother Amma.
Copyright voor mijn schilderijen is wereldwijd geregistreerd bij U.S. Copyright Office
Period 4 until 2020: The forces of nature
Over the years I also continued to paint seas, water and trees. The colors, as I experience and render them in my abstract work penetrate in these paintings to the core of experiencing unity, the ultimate experience of Light. In meditation and in nature, I find this again and again. I recognize patterns when I am in nature, and experience a softness, a subtlety, in which my body merges into the resonance of nature.
During this period, I began to more deeply integrate the serenity and realistic delicate energies, as expressions of the earth and nature, into my abstract work. I also began to experience again the inner urge to exhibit my work. Step by step, I retrieved the paintings of periods 2, 3 and 4 from storage to prepare them for exhibition. After the release of my book "Sea of Light" my work is again hanging at various exhibitions and can be viewed in my studio by appointment.
Below you can see some of my work from the two series: "The Spirit of Water" and "The Earthly Elements".
Series: The Spirit of Water
In water I find the great flow of energy, like an open clarity, a surging, intuitive flow. When I tune in, I feel in this natural flow the inner strength, the Light and silence, the nourishing Source. From this inspiration, feeling and inner experience formed these new paintings.
Sometimes I paint and don't yet know what emerges. If I look later I see recognizable patterns of flowing water, waves of the sea, roots of trees, flowers, or tree trunks, for example. I then work these out and deepen my perception of feeling in the painting. This gives each painting its own character, appearance and form.
Series: The Eartlhy Elements
Copyright for my paintings is registered worldwide with U.S. Copyright Office
Expositions
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to expose my work in a variety of settings - from intimate restaurants and hotels to spiritual places and historic churches. Each of these places offered my paintings a different grounding, a different light.
All of my paintings carry spiritual energy of inner landscapes.
They invite stillness - and a quiet remembering of what has always lived deep within the heart.
My work has been exhibited at the following locations, among others:
- Restaurant Onder de Linde - Bergen
- Restaurant Studlers - Bergen
- Hotel Breeburgh - Bergen
- Hotel Joli - Bergen
- Grote Ursula Church - Warmenhuizen
- Zota Beach Hotel - Florida
- Residential Care Centre De Marke - Bergen
- Atelier Dorpstraat 13 - Bergen
- White Chapel - Groet
- De Berkeley (formerly De Wijde Nes) - Bergen
- Art Centre De Kazerne - Bergen
- Van Reenen School - Bergen
My studio is open by appointment.
You are warmly invited to experience a moment of silence and beauty at Hallstein Nes 19, in Bergen.
When someone feels deeply touched by one of my paintings and wishes to purchase it, I take time to feel together how the work truly resonates - on a soul level, for this moment and for the journey ahead.
White Church in Groet
Bergen Arts Center, in the old Fire Station
My first exposition in 2004 in the old building of the current Berkeley on Nesdijk Bergen
“Your dream landscapes bring me instantly into being - I dissolve into them and can’t stop looking.”
“I feel the waves of the sea - alive and moving. Sometimes, when I’m in front of your ocean painting, I experience such depth, such stillness, such power, love, and trust. Truly a gift.”
“In your third artistic phase, I see the pure form of the Aboriginals - it’s so palpable. Such beauty.”
“Your work has been on my wall for 15 years - it’s the most valuable thing I own. Every day I enjoy it and feel grateful all over again.”
“Your dot compositions - energetically and intuitively built - touch the essence of what makes pointillism so powerful: the dot as a carrier of vibration and silence, a subtle encoding of inner energy. In contrast to classical approaches, you reveal a pure expression of energetic flow.”
“Where Seurat and Signac worked with color and light, you work with inner landscapes and energy - a contemporary, spiritual echo of pointillism, akin to contemplative dot work or energetic abstraction.”
Realistische en abstracte Kunst van Marieke Krista Engelbregt