There is a painting on the wall behind him. Big. A figure shaped by the ideals society decided were normal. Johnny Buivenga painted it, and when he talks about it, he is not describing a finished thing. He is describing an argument he is still having.

Johnny is a painter. He is also a psychologist, a personal trainer, and someone who spent years in the kind of corporate life that, in his words, makes you "lose yourself in the fast life or in things that really don't matter that much." He did not always paint. He drew through school, then stopped when drawing became something graded, something you did for a result. He went to university instead, wanting to prove he was smart enough. He built a company. He ran sports classes. He kept moving. And for a while, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

"I wasn't really happy with what I was doing," he says, simply. No drama around it. The medium of his work was too small, the exercises and training programs leaving something pressurized inside him with nowhere to go. He had been drawing his whole life, grown up in a house where both parents were artists, and the need had never disappeared. It had just been waiting.

He picked up painting seriously about three and a half years ago.

The paintings he makes are almost all self-portraits. But not self-portraits in any ordinary sense. In them, he is attacking himself, hiding from himself, fighting eight versions of himself simultaneously. He describes his work as figurative art about personal and psychological processes, but that description is cooler than the actual experience of looking at them. They feel like someone working something out in real time, using oil paint and significant hours, on canvas, in a studio where he sits alone most of the day.

"If you want to create you have to tap into yourself," he says. "You have to sit with yourself for hours or days and check with yourself what do I want to make."

He came to understand this through painting, but he had already come to it once before, a different way. He remembers standing in an information day at university, listening to a professor describe what the psychology degree was about: why do people think what they think, feel what they feel, do what they do. "And that sentence it struck me," he says. The same thing that drove him to study human behavior is what drives him into the studio. Not ambition. Curiosity. An interest in people so foundational that it does not distinguish between himself and others. His self-portraits are not narcissism. They are research conducted on the most available subject.

He references a book by a Belgian psychiatrist, a book about what happens to the body when expression is suppressed. The argument in it, as he relays it, is physical: tension that cannot get out becomes disease. He mentions Louise Bourgeois in the same breath, a woman who wrote and drew every night, scrabbling things out of herself, and he says the book makes the case that this is what kept her healthy. He finds this convincing, not as a metaphor but as a medical reality. "When people are not doing those things it's very unhealthy thing to do."

For Johnny, this is not theoretical. He is direct about what painting does for him in a way that sounds earned rather than rehearsed. "I think painting or creating in a broader sense allows me to get a little bit closer to myself," he says. Without it, he believes he would have continued drifting. "I was drifting away a little bit more for myself rather than going inwards."

The process itself is not clean. He puts on music, gets distracted, checks Instagram, goes back. He is honest about the loneliness of working alone all day, how the phone becomes a way of staying connected when there is no one else in the room. The flow states he describes, those moments where everything disappears and there is only the painting, are "brief and short" for him. Not long stretches of unbroken immersion. Just flashes. And around those flashes, frustration, self-doubt, and the particular confrontation of looking at something early and thinking, in his words, "what the fuck is this."

His mantra for getting through it: "All the beginning is ugly."

He says this with the conviction of someone who has tested it enough times to know it holds. He started painting a dog recently, hated it at 25%, felt it shift at 75%, returned the next morning and thought he had done a nice job. The experience is repeatable. The knowledge that ugly beginnings become something does not make the ugly beginning easier, but it makes it survivable. And when things do come together, when the painting turns, he starts singing. Dancing. "Euphoric moments maybe," he says, and then immediately qualifies the word as a little too much.

The work he makes now is moving toward something more abstract. He likes his sketches, the ones he makes fast, before his head can interfere. He likes a painting he made of his cat, which is not here with him today. He suspects he likes it partly because it is not him, and he laughs saying that. His current series features a personal trainer alongside the subject being trained, a pairing he finds funny because he is a personal trainer himself. But the series is a critique. It shows people weighing grams of oats before breakfast, obsessing over the body, and he is pointing at something underneath the behavior. "What the fuck are we doing," he says, not rhetorically. He means it as a serious question.

He is not easy on the world he lives in. He thinks about it constantly, the way systems target basic human needs and attach them to products, the way phones are designed to be addictive and then nine hours disappear. "This goes on in my mind like every fucking single second," he says. He puts it in the paintings, not as instruction but as question. He wants people to see the scenes he paints and recognize themselves. "Okay I'm not alone in this," is the response he is working toward. Someone else had this struggle. I will keep pushing on.

His goals, when he names them, fall into two categories. The first is the one that matters more to him: to express himself in a way that soothes him, to become who he is. He quotes a line he heard once and found beautiful: the best thing you can do in life is becoming who you are. He is still learning what this means in practice. He is trying to get out of his head, to let his body and senses lead, to trust what feels right rather than what looks like it should be right.

The second goal is more earthly. He wants to be a great painter. He wants to be recognized, to sell work, to have shows. He is self-organizing his first one at the end of August. He is working from home right now, no gallery, no representation, uncertain money, significant commitment of time into something with no financial guarantee. He finds that a struggle. He says so plainly.

"I became more Johnny," he says, when asked how these years of painting have changed him. "That's just the most important answer."

He is on a good place right now. Not easy all the time, but good. He knows this is the thing he is supposed to be doing. And when you sit with that knowledge alongside the self-portraits, the ones where he is fighting himself, hiding from himself, wrestling with eight versions of who he might be, you start to understand that the paintings are not just about the past. They are how he keeps finding his way back.

Written and published by our legendary Chief of Publications Pauline Garcin.