Joran van der Haar studied illustration at the Utrecht University of the Arts from 1998 to 2002. After this training, he obtained his teaching qualification between 2002 and 2004. Since 2006, Joran van der Haar has been working as an art teacher in Hardenberg and combines this with being an artist.

Since graduating, he has developed his own style… just not with paint yet. He made a kind of drawn collages in which he combined pen and ink with digital techniques. The result was colorful prints that were glued on dibond and cast in epoxy.

It was not until 2014 that Joran van der Haar became captivated by realism and started painting with oil for the first time.

After visiting the exhibition 'Closer - the mega-realism of Tjalf Sparnaay' in Museum de Fundatie, he was very impressed by this work. Huge canvases with everyday subjects painted in an extremely detailed manner. However, he was still looking for his own subject.

In the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis he found the still lifes of Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Jan van Huysum and Ambrosius Bosschaert have always been great. He can look for a long time at all the details in such a painting and be amazed by the texture and depth.

These paintings were the reason to start painting flower still lifes... only in a large format.