My name is Gabriëlle van Kleef and I am a classically trained portrait artist located in the beautiful city of Boston, Massachusetts. I grew up bathed in the influence of Dutch and Flemish Masters whose works fill the museums and inform the culture of my home country, the Netherlands. It was there that I learned to respect and appreciate the liveliness and the discipline of portrait art through the brush of Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer and so many others. As I began to paint myself, I grew to love the works of impressionist artists like Degas and Monet, admiring their ability to present us with a picture of emotion, to capture the feeling of a fleeting and transient moment. My journey as an artist has found me constantly striving and working to unify the realistic representation of my sitters with the ability to tell a story, to capture the feeling of a person. As an expressive arts therapy student, I believe in the power of art as a final product but also as a process. I want to share this process with my sitter as we work together to tell the story of who they are. A portrait is so much more than a picture, it is a representation of the soul and, to me, the journey to achieving that representation is as inspiring and enjoyable as the final piece.