How Harriery came to be.

Harriery is the work of Yasin Ütük — an acrylic painter living and working in Voorburg, the Netherlands. The shop is one month old on Etsy, sixteen pieces deep, and openly the early chapter of a longer practice.

Yasin’s pull toward painting started early — there was always a sketchbook nearby — but the serious acrylic work began later, in 2020, after settling in the Netherlands at twenty-five. What had been an interest became a practice almost on its own: a quiet way to spend evenings, a way to keep company with himself in a new country, a way to translate the world he saw into something he could hold.

Painting wasn’t a stranger when Yasin picked it up. His maternal grandfather painted as an amateur — vivid childhood memories, paintings he would return to as a kid, the same scenes seen at different ages. An aunt still gives painting workshops and classes today.

So the practice arrived already framed. There was a family language for what it meant to spend an afternoon with paint, what it meant to take your time, what it meant to put work on a wall and let it be looked at. None of that had to be invented; it had to be remembered.

The catalogue isn’t accidental. Two subjects keep returning: the cosmos — the moon, a black hole, a night sky — and forest, mountain, and nature. The first moves him because of its scale, the way infinity is unanswerable. The second steadies him; calm and serenity look like a woodland to him before they look like anything else.

Underneath both, the aim is the same: warmth, peace, character. The cosmic pieces and the cottagecore pieces serve the same emotional brief — they are different rooms in the same house. Even the whimsical work plays in that key. The Whimsical Night Sky piece, for instance, is the Little Prince held in Van Gogh’s warmth — a Saint-Exupéry character lit by the colour of someone else’s brushwork.

Through the shading, colour, and light, the goal is harmony — and the hope is that a viewer recognises it and feels drawn into a sense of familiarity.

Almost no Harriery piece starts from a photograph. Yasin keeps the scene in his head and roughs it onto the canvas in black, on a soft grid, before any colour goes down. The grid is the only piece of scaffolding — the rest of the painting is then a sequence of decisions made with a brush.

He paints from farthest to nearest. Background sky and atmosphere first, mid-ground next, the main subject last. By the time the central figure goes in, the painting already knows what light it wants.

A small canvas might take a single sitting. It might also take days, while he works through doubt about a single passage of colour. Larger pieces — the textured Moon, the black hole, the canyon — have spanned three or four months across many revisits. The studio is the corner of a room in Voorburg. He paints mostly at night, with music or a podcast playing.

The early Etsy shop is a stepping stone, not the home. The work is heading toward bigger canvases and ultra-realistic, highly detailed pieces — the kind of work where a painting earns the wall it lives on just by being looked at carefully.

Alongside the canvases, workshops. The first Dutch-language workshop happened at the Voorburg Library in August 2025; a few more are planned. Showing the practice to other people — children, neighbours, anyone curious — has turned out to matter as much as the painting itself.

If you’d like the work in a room of yours, the originals are on Etsy. If you’d like to host a workshop, talk about a commission, or be told when the next bigger piece lands, the email is open.