Sometimes it’s best to let the artist to talk about their own work; this is what Niels Smits van Burgst writes about his artistic development:

When I graduated in 1994 I decided to depict what it is like to be alive. I started painting my own life, and gradually added some friends and acquaintances to the stories. Later on exhibition visitors and party people joined in the scene. Then in 2004 I entered the world wide web.
     Private pictures are shared through the net as souvenirs of an experience one can never take part in. The images are like film stills of a movie you've never seen. I browse these anonymous fragments, trying to get involved, imagining being there with these guys. I try to revive these shared moments and add them to my own painted adventures.
     I show slices of a civilised world in which excesses are channelled through stylised formats like art, porn, music, internet, television, religion or sports. We suppress lust, sadism, aggression, and even euphoria to modest levels to keep interaction civilised, although these tendencies always lurk behind the surface. Indulgence might be a hidden driver for men's action, but it shouldn’t show. Anything might happen, but preferably not in public. Anything might surface, but probably not today.
     My paintings show men trapped in their daily life, caught up in my brush-strokes. They exist there, without a plot to their stories.
     My friends' lives become romanticised by the act of painting. Will you get involved in their boredom, jokes and modest euphoria? They won’t. The inhabitants of my paintings share neither busyness nor idleness; they simply show what it’s like to be alive.