Nils Verkaeren’s Tidal Flux presents a series of plein air paintings shaped by the shifting rhythms of light, weather, and tide along the Belgian coast. Through a process-driven approach, the artist captures not a fixed image, but a lived encounter with landscape in flux.

In Tidal Flux, Verkaeren redefines landscape painting as a site of ongoing negotiation—between artist and environment, gesture and condition. Working directly on the tidal flats of Knokke-Heist, he resists the idea of the landscape as static. His canvases, textured with impasto and atmospheric color, absorb the elements—salt, wind, moisture—and turn them into painterly material. Each work emerges from an embodied process of being present in the environment, guided as much by weather and chance as by composition or form. Rather than illustrating a scene, these paintings register shifts in light, erosion, and horizon. Verkaeren’s process merges observation with immersion, offering not representations of place, but a temporal record of being-with the land. As tide and sky change, so too do the canvases—tracing the ephemeral and material traces of the coast.