About Me

I see life in general as a very complex collective subconscious verocious universal intelligence in which individual incarnated minds are floating, fighting and drowning each other to be in control, in a universal sea of waving collective, political minds absorbing and influencing each other constantly. So minds ((collective: countries and individual: persons) with all different rates of consciousness, intelligence, which intellectuals try to scale in empiric unreliable intelligence tests), which influence or eat (figural speaking) each other constantly, and which evolves sometimes fluently but mostly in a disastrous painful way to come to insight or a higher level of consciousness when the damage is done. (cfr. Jesus suffering). 

Life is like a big mysterious sea to me, the more I  learn and want to know about it the greater, the deeper and endless it becomes. But also the deeper my comprehension and perspective, the more images I can diversify and understand, and see and try to express in a painting! 

When I make a portrait of somebody or even a landscape or a still life I am also fascinated by the vibrations of the colours which inspire me to come to a unique result, always surprising, even to myself. It's like giving birth to something new what didn't exist until I brought it to life.

As you can see when you study my oil PAINTINGS I always start by making a quasi realistic painting as a study of the subject close to reality to make a more expressionistic painting of the same subject afterwards.

To be busy with art means more to me then simply using a brush to paint. For me painting is communicating with my environment through images. By manipulating tools (brushes and paint and solvents and the chemistry between those) in time and space. I determine their positions in a measured space on a piece of cut canvas in a frame. This frame is not timeless but will transcend time, because it was born in time and will transcend the past and the time it’s heading, because each time and era will interact with the frame and challenge and change its meaning continuously. I mean the meaning of its origin in the past will never be equal to its actual meaning now.

Just as words have their position and space in a sentence (and the sentence in a text and a context), each brush strike influences the previous and the next brushstrokes and gives its expression and texture and meaning or vibration level, and can be interpreted or (mis)understood by the viewer (cfr. Listener) in different times. To me paintings are a product of a working procedure, and find their origin in the interaction between ideas (subconscious, conscious or collective) and material forms.

Like our imagination or imaginary language (in our mind) can be triggered by a picture language (material form) and put in a knew form, which I or others can only understand if we have studied its texts in detail without forgetting its time of birth and origin in space. Clichématic it is frequently said, a picture says more than thousand words. However, that has been not entirely well said, because a picture can contain a lot of pictures if we cut or divide the picture into pieces (a puzzle) in one and the same frame or shot. These puzzles, ( which we then translate in a lot of words trying to make the image audible to oneself and which we compare in our minds with images of our memory, we already knew from the past, but which we might have forgotten allready) are almost automatically ordered by us again in our minds. And a word is of course an interiorised sensation with an image (which can be a visual or sensational, for instance an image you see, hear, taste or smell) and an interpretation of a picture. The key question is then; “Are we able to find the right words to describe a picture to well define this image”? This is thus an important question, and next, “can the picture of something honestly tell the truth”?. My answer is no. Our eye looks at e.g. saccadic [1], by example from left to right and above to down, whereas if you read words there is an order which you must respect. This is among other things a problem by solving crimes. Often victims must rely on their memory to remember the image of the aggressors and they seem not to be able to do this without making huge mistakes.  This is a big problem in forensic research. This is a problem at solving offences, frequently victims must rely on their memory to recall the picture and then you see how poor that memory concerning the picture is or how difficult it is to put these memories in the right words. Frequently it turns out more difficult than expected to define the image, moreover because the other senses, such as sounds (also (the voice)), the fragrance or smell etc. ...help to recall this memory.

In comparison within reality you can also distinguish a lot of pictures in a painted soundless picture. But in reality  you have  beside the visual picture, ongoing consonance and fragrance pictures which surround us and provide and influence our knowledge with smultanious and contradictary supplementary information. In a painting (visual picture) in a two-dimensional area with a forefront, a background and a middle front and a context to that all, a lot of supplementary background information gets lost. And paintings who do not have form but in which you only see colours that vibrate beside each other are even more hard to understand. Those pictures in pictures and colours in colours we then see according to our memory are selected by us. Images and colours  we are trusted with we see first. In other words we do not see everything that is in our visual field or what we might see on the painting when we analyse it, because our visual act works selectively. If we would see everything what is in our face field we would become crazy. That is similar with hearing, our ears filter sounds like our eyes filter visions, we see and hear in a selective way. In cognitive psychology there are a lot of discussions around these themes. Therefore what you will see in my work is not only the consequence of my activity, what you will see and also will project from your knowledge is also mainly your intellectual activity. The looking act is therefore never passive, even if you close your eyes you  still have an after image. By this I mean that, what you see in my paintings is maybe not what I have tried  to exteriorise or express within my paintings, (that what’s a part of my emotions and feelings), and what you see can be interpreted or translated completely differently in words by Jan, Anne, Piet or Jos. That is what I think  is so  fascinating about art. It’s just like reading a book, you yourself can fantasise pictures. And at seeing an art work you yourself can consider words or fantasise a tale. For this reason I nevertheless will give a little explanation at some of my works and for the rest I leave your fantasies free course.

_____________________Next: MORE FIGURE PAINTINGS!