Information
What did lead you towards here? Maybe it is the need for stillness? Maybe you will find here an interiorised and hopeful image of our relationship with earth and nature? In any way, welcome to this colourful, silent place.
Green-flow-art
May I present myself as a creator of ‘green-flow-art’, while my art is obedient to nature in the first place. For me ‘Green flow’ means: an endless flow of growth and natural creation; the timeless exchange between the always renewing cycle of growth in the visible nature and the unseen unity.
Since 1975 I consider myself an artist, making paintings and drawings. I’ve been a singer-songwriter, I write, and photography plays an important supporting role besides painting, but most of all I experience my destiny in the subtle play with color and shape.
Art book
As all children I felt out of wholeness too, probably about my seventh year. It will take a whole life to admit this wholeness… while painting. The experience of coherence and unity in nature constantly evokes new inner images that resonate with my quest, which has been accomplished more or less by a journey through the colors — a ‘transformation in color’. Therefor this is the title of an art book on my work that was presented in 2011 at my 60th birthday.
Light and water
The central themes in my ethereal work are: the ethereal qualities of ’light’ and ‘water’; the life-energy that flows through everything; the interwoven rhythms of shapes and streams; the poetic expressions of nature impressions. To every painting proceeds an inner image — of the merging of inner and outer world, of the seen and the unseen.
Journeys
Several landscapes had a crucial influence on my work, although I’m not a real traveller. The first time I perished the wide space of the heathland was a touching experience, since I grew up in the city with only now and than green interludes such as summer holidays in the woods in Belgium nearby Maastricht. From 1977 till 1983 the spacious fields in Friesland in winter were my soundboard. Then hiking tours across the high mountains of Norway, France and Switzerland lead to more dynamics in my work. And in the overwhelming nature of Bhutan I felt like coming home and taken up in a sacred landscape.
Sacred landscape
About 1997 a period followed in which I strived for expressing the merging of the visible, local landscape — in the vicinity of my domicile Schinveld — with the streaming life forces of the timeless and non-local space. From this some projects in the landscape derived which accompanied my process as an artist (Aarde-Rombus-project; small- scale land-art; research of points of power in relation to tree growth).
In 2018 I start the series ‘Kristalbos’ Crystal forest in which I connect different ways of looking at nature and landscape. I select six forest in the basin of the Roode Beek (Red stream) where I experienced a benevolent completeness of trees and places of power. I express my connection with this totality — genius loci, streaming life energy, and trees — in photographs, maps and paintings. In 2019 this tiring search to ‘connection’ in the landscape leads me back towards the silence of the inner space.
Technique
I started painting with egg-tempera on paper and canvas, then with casein-oil tempera on panel (diluted with water, not with turpentine). My handwriting defines oneself by a concentrated rhythm of color dashes of in several, half-transparent layers. In this manner an optic color weave in a vivid palette is build that evokes spatiality, vibration and flow. During the years my handwriting develops — from fine, strait color stripes into curved dashes, than to bigger, more dynamic dashes or combinations of fine and bigger dashes. Since 2013 I also make drawings in mixed media (pencil, charcoal, water color).
Biography
I was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 1951, where I raised up in a family with six children. I received ample formal art training (1969 – 1976) at the Academy of Industrial Arts in Eindhoven, the City Academy and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. From 1977 onwards I organized local expositions with regular intervals. After 1975 I started to make some journeys. After my study time I lived with my wife Lidy and two sons Jonathan and Elgar at the Frisian coast in the north, then five years in Tiel at the river Waal, and since 1987 in Schinveld in an old farmhouse with courtyard in the south of the Netherlands. Here I also started with painting lessons and workshops ‘geomancy and color’. Lately I mainly focus on the mental freedom which painting gives to me and the silent attention to achieve this.