The women in Painted Idols
Painting Riae four times
5 min read ▪ 29 August 2026
Home › Notes from the studio › The women in Painted Idols › Painting Riae four times
Willem van der Krieken painted the same woman four times without planning to, and only noticed what the four had in common once they stood side by side.
Who is Riae, and why are there four paintings of her?
Riae Suicide is looked at for three seconds at a time, thousands of times a day. Four canvases in the Painted Idols series are painted from photographs she published herself, each credited to its source. They were not made as a set. They accumulated over months, and the thing they have in common only became visible once they were standing next to each other: in none of the four is she looking at the viewer.
- Four oil paintings on stretched canvas, from 80 × 100 cm to 120 × 100 cm, each one of one.
- Every one credits the photograph it came from, and names her.
- There is no print of any of them. The four canvases are the only versions that exist.
How she arrived: scrolling past, and going back
I scrolled past her and went back. That is the whole of the decision, and it is the same decision every time: at that point I decide nothing, I just save it, and then it sits in the archive until it starts asking for something.
Months later I began painting. Days at a time, then a week of nothing, then more days. That is not a technique. It is how long it takes me to look at one image properly.
The photograph was built for three seconds of somebody’s attention. I spent weeks inside it. That gap — three seconds against several weeks — is the entire series in one sentence, and it is why the paintings are not the photographs.
The four canvases
| Painting | Size | What I was doing |
|---|---|---|
| Riae (Orange Van) | 120 × 100 cm | It was the sweat. Something in it is faintly vulgar and never once tips into cheap. I still cannot find the line it walks. |
| Riae (Bathing in Red) | 120 × 80 cm | She gives away less here than in the others. There is something in this canvas I never managed to identify, and I painted it anyway. |
| Riae (Blue Hair) | 100 × 100 cm | Most of this canvas is not her. It is what she is kneeling on, and I could not tell you why that had to take four weeks. |
| Riae (Mobile Phone) | 80 × 100 cm | Neither of us is looking at the other, and that suits me. Whatever is holding her attention is not me and is not you. |
All four are oil on stretched canvas, signed, one of one, with a certificate of authenticity. None of them is a print and none of them will become one.
What only shows up across four
Four canvases of the same woman, and she has never once met my eye.
I did not plan that. I only noticed when I put them side by side, which was long after all four were finished. Nobody chooses a thing like that; it turns up, and then you have to decide whether to believe it.
What it means, I think, is that I was never painting a person looking at me. Her attention is elsewhere in every single one — at something outside the frame, at a phone, at nothing. That is a strange thing to discover about a series you made yourself, and it is the reason this particular subject went to four instead of stopping at one.
It also quietly answers a question people ask about the whole series, which is whether these are pictures for the viewer. Four times over, they are not.
Why paint the same person more than once
Because the first one did not finish the job.
A painting stops when I am done with it, not when it is. The image has been dealt with, it no longer pulls at me, and I can go on to the next one. With most subjects that happens once. With this one it happened, and then the archive still had more of her in it, and the pull came back.
There is a practical consequence for anyone looking at the four: they are not variations and they are not a set. Buying one does not leave a gap. Each was finished on its own terms and several years of looking separate the first from the last.
If you want the wider version of that argument — why a painting that took weeks is a different object from an image that took a second — it is in where the line sits between erotic art and pornography.
The photograph, and how it is credited
Every painting in Painted Idols credits the photograph it came from. On all four of these it reads: inspired by a photograph of Riae Suicide (@riae_).
That credit is the point rather than a formality. The subjects of this series are women who are looked at for three seconds at a time, and who published the photographs themselves. Naming the source says out loud that the image did not start with the painter, and that is what separates painting from a found image from pretending you invented one.
It is also why the paintings carry her name at all. An anonymous nude would be an easier object to sell and a less honest one. The rest of the series works the same way, and the women in Painted Idols sets out who they are and how a photograph becomes a canvas.
Questions people ask
Who is Riae?
Riae Suicide is looked at for three seconds at a time, thousands of times a day. Four canvases in the Painted Idols series are painted from photographs she published herself, and each painting credits the source photograph and names her.
How many paintings of Riae are there?
Four, all oil on stretched canvas: Orange Van at 120 × 100 cm, Bathing in Red at 120 × 80 cm, Blue Hair at 100 × 100 cm, and Mobile Phone at 80 × 100 cm. Each is one of one.
Is there a print of any of the Riae paintings?
No. Signed prints exist of nine other paintings in the series, but none of the four Riae canvases. The originals are the only versions of these that exist.
Are the paintings copies of the photographs?
No. A photograph made for a few seconds of attention becomes a painting worked on for weeks, at a size and in a medium the photograph never had. The source is credited precisely because the painting is not the same object.
