At the foothills of Belgium’s Ardennes, artists
Nicky Myny and
Nina Kay joined forces at
Daft Hotel & Music Studio for an immersive artist residency. Over a few wildly generative days, they painted a shared story. One large-scale artwork split into over twenty unique, abstract pieces. Using sticks, wildflowers, and the energy of their surroundings, they built a mixed media collection that embodies both freedom and focus.
This collaboration, Daft by Nature, celebrates creative duality: structure and spontaneity, nature and nurture, stillness and motion. The residency allowed the artists to escape the noise of everyday life while still feeding on the electric aliveness of community, music, laughter, and shared meals.
Stillness Isn’t the Only Sacred
Why creativity thrives in the unexpected
When people hear“artist residency,” they often picture remote cabins, absolute silence, and artists tucked away in solitude, whispering to their canvases. And while that version exists (and has its place) our recent experience at Hotel Daft offered a radically different kind of creative fuel.
We didn’t retreat into quiet. We dove into life.
Nature and Noise: Not Opposites
Hotel Daft is nestled in the Ardennes: a lush, forested escape that invites barefoot walks and fireside reflections. But inside? It’s buzzing with life: a music studio, a cinema, a DJ booth, and communal lounges where artists from all walks of life eat, share, laugh, and occasionally get weird together. It’s part retreat, part riot.
It would be easy to think this contrast, between the meditative outdoors and the sonic indoor energy, would clash. Instead, it cracked us open. We stepped into nature not to escape the world, but to charge up. Then we brought that charge straight into our process.
Our collaboration, an evolving series of abstract paintings split into 20+ pieces, was born from this tension. We used sticks from forest paths as mark-makers. We painted to the sounds of shared playlists and spontaneous conversation. The stillness of the woods gave us direction. The daftness of the space gave us fire.
Sacred Doesn’t Mean Silent
There’s a popular narrative that “true” creativity happens only in isolation, that artists must disconnect to go deep. But here’s what we found: depth can come from connection.
We created side-by-side, watching our styles blend and diverge. We embellished each other's marks. We gave each piece space to breathe, then flooded it with playful, unexpected moves. We were still, then wild. Quiet, then ridiculous. Reverent, then loud.
Creativity doesn’t only live in the slow, sacred spaces. Sometimes it wakes up when someone hands you a flower-dipped stick and dares you to paint with your eyes closed.
Process Over Perfection
The art that emerged from Hotel Daft isn’t polished. It’s alive. Each canvas tells the story of a moment, a conversation, a playful dare. It’s about momentum and process, not outcome and perfection.
And that, honestly, is the point. Creative escapism isn’t about fleeing the world. It’s about finding new ways to be in it. To say yes to mess. Yes to beauty. Yes to imperfect, in-process aliveness.
In a world obsessed with curated feeds and refined results, we’re standing for something else: the real stuff. The paint-under-your-fingernails, laugh-until-you-snort, stick-in-your-hand kind of art. The kind that gets made when nature and noise shake hands.
