Jan Giliam
Jan Giliam is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. He makes drawings, glass works and paintings through automatic drawing. Each work emerges in the moment itself, without a predetermined plan. The line determines where it goes, not the other way around.
In his studio he melts old glass into new panels. He works with used window panes and waste glass from fellow artists, and draws directly onto the glass before it goes into the kiln. What comes out is never entirely predictable. The materials have their own history, their own story. He leaves that intact.
His work is not a solo enterprise. He regularly collaborates with Rik Lina and with the Cabo Mondego Section of Portuguese Surrealism, a collective of poets and visual artists. Collective automatic drawing and painting is what’s at stake there. It is not about consensus, but about the tension between autonomy and surrender to the process. What emerges in that space between individual and group—that’s what matters.
That surrealist approach also shapes how he titles his work. The titles of these drawings are randomly paired with the drawings, selected from a collection of over 330 phrases: gathered newspaper headlines and self-composed fragments. Chance reveals connections that deliberate choice would never find.
Alongside his artistic practice, Giliam works as a self-employed coach for young people with autism or complex medical conditions. He supports them in the transition from special education towards a next step: further study, work, or exploring possible directions from home. His approach is informed by présence philosophy—being present without a fixed agenda—and by the artist’s familiarity with uncertainty: no fixed methods, but space to discover together.
These two worlds feed each other. What he learns from young people about authenticity he brings into the studio. The freedom and experimentation of his artistic practice he shows to young people who think there is only one way to move through the world. There are always multiple paths.
Giliam studied Visual Arts, Pedagogy and Mathematics in Amsterdam. Later he learned glass fusion at the Bohle Glass Academy in Germany and took private lessons with glass artist Bert Grotjohann. But his real education is the work itself: making, failing, discovering, continuing, every day.
About his work he says: “Ensuing gestures and colour choices determine the images that emerge. I work out these images, drawing whatever presents itself to me, with no goal other than transmitting the impulse or desire of the moment, in an écriture automatique. The moment of metamorphosis appeals to me; when drawing a line, I follow the process. I let the line transform.”
