Ewoud de Groot was born in 1969 in Alkmaar, in the Netherlands and studied at the Kunstacademie Minerva in Gronigen from 1991 to 1996. He lives and works in the small North Sea village, Egmond aan Zee but grew up between the North Sea and the Waddensea, a large tidal mud flat system between the North of Holland and the south of Denmark. In the early seventies, his father bought an old Dutch Shrimp cutter and made it into a vessel. They used to go sailing and fishing and collecting mussels with this boat. Under the huge skies and out on the open water, Ewoud was impressed and influenced by his surroundings and choosing wading birds as a subject came naturally to him. His paintings are between realism and abstractism, where the subject is mostly painted in a more traditional manner and the landscape is mostly painted in a more suggestive way. Ewoud likes to play with complementary colours, in other words, the contrast between warm and cold colours as the painting as a whole is more important than the subject itself. Recently he became a member of the ‘Pulchri Studio’ – the artist society of The Hague and the most prestigious in Holland. In September he had the honour of being selected for the ‘Birds in Art Exhibition’ at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, USA.