Arches® Resident Artist

Christian Koivumaa was born in 1978 in Northern Sweden and grew up there. Very quickly he opted for a sporting career, in karate; After succeeding brilliantly on the international stage, injury forced him into early retirement. This marked the opening of a new chapter in his life as he joined the art world with the same commitment that had earned him his success in sport.

Amanda Reis is a Brazilian artist living in Portugal. She first discovered watercolour in 2017 and fell in love with the light, fluid nature of this painting technique which she finds very relaxing.

Joan Coch is a Spanish artist with innate artistic skills. As a child, he already showed astonishing creative abilities, which he would go on, on to continually develop throughout his career as a professional artist in different fields: architecture, interior decoration, visual arts, painting.

Steve Mitchell has been drawing since he was a child. When he was six, his mother gave him a “step-by-step” drawing book – and a passion for drawing was born. When he was about ten, he started to try out different media like graphite and charcoal, and gradually started to perfect his technique.

Botanical watercolour painter Vincent Jeannerot was born in Lyon in 1961. His taste for contemplating nature began during family walks in the countryside around Lyon.

Luke Adam Hawker is a professional artist based in Surrey, England. He studied Interior Architecture and Design at Nottingham Trent University and worked as a designer in London before becoming a full-time artist in 2015. He has a passion for drawing on location and is fascinated by the world around him, using art as a way of connecting with places and people.

Drawing was originally only a hobby for Alyse, who was a professional rock climber until she fell from a cliff during a hike in 2012.

Born in Palencia in Spain in 1993, Carlos Rodríguez Casado is a passionate portrait artist and caricaturist who works as a press and editorial illustrator. His illustrations, done exclusively in watercolour, are mainly published in the Spanish daily El Mundo, but he has also worked for MTV, Jot Down, Interviú, Metrópoli as well as taking part in various publishing projects.

Born in 1973 in Kunming in the Chinese province of Yunnan, a member of the Yi people, Chen Liu gained a M.A. in decorative painting in 1996 at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts (now called The Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University). He teaches at the School of Fine Arts of Yunnan Art University.

Thierry Duval has been drawing and painting since childhood. He produced his first work in 1980 in a narrative form, the comic strip, and would later work as an illustrator, then as a part of the creative team in a large advertising agency in Paris. It was while he was preparing for the entrance exam for the Arts Décoratifs school in Paris that he discovered the work of Delacroix and then a passion for watercolour. He graduated in 1982.