How coordinated are you? Are you ambidextrous, meaning you can use both hands equally? Or can you barely walk and chew bubble gum at the same time?
Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but Rajacenna van Dam blows us all out of the water. The 29-year-old artist from Rotterdam, the Netherlands is capable of using all four of her limbs simultaneously. Not only that, she can create up to six beautiful, hyper-realistic illustrations at once.
Rajacenna’s website explains that she is a former child prodigy who was discovered when she was sixteen. Since then, she has become one of the best and youngest hyper-realistic artists using pencils as their primary medium in the world.
The idea to use both her hands and her feet to draw came to Rajacenna back in 2019.
“In 2019, the idea came to me to be more productive because I didn’t make any artworks for the previous years due to health issues,” she explained. “I didn’t practice it at all and just started doing it.”
Hoping to understand the science behind her extraordinary capabilities, Rajacenna had an EEG scan done of her brain. The test showed she had remarkable brain performance, and that her full brain wasn’t even engaged as she was drawing.
“The connectivity between the left and right brain are totally connected and three times higher than normal,” she explained. “So they exchange information at a very fast speed.”
Rajacenna works by switching her focus back and forth between all of the works. She mainly uses pencils and paint, and her favorite thing to draw is famous people like pop stars, actors, and members of the Royal family. Although she can create up to six drawings at once, each one takes about 40 hours of work to get it just right.
“I always draw people that I love and inspire me, for my other work I love to create things from my imagination,” she said.
Who else feels really uncoordinated right now? Here we are thinking we’re doing okay writing with just one hand at a time…. We’ve got to up our game!
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