Abstract
African Laughter Series
Africa has made a lasting impression on me and became a major source of inspiration for my work. I need to paint it. But how? Africa stands for so much. I am at the start of what I expect to be an extended period of deep exploration into what exactly that is, and how to express it. The series presented here contains the first step on this journey.
Colour dance Series
In these paintings I return to more brilliant colours. When I started painting I often applied bright hues straight from the tube. Nowadays I still love using the bright ones, but combined with desaturated colours, making the former stand out even more.
Scenes of Nature Collage Series
These paintings are collage pieces which were made on the basis of hikes in the nature areas around my home town. While hiking I sketched and took photos, focusing on the big picture as well as on details/close-ups. On the basis of this source material I painted (elements of) nature scenes on large sheets of paper. After which I tore these into big pieces and reassembled them into collages.
Seasonal Series
These seasonal mini-series weren't planned but revealed themselves as such during the intuitive painting process. Each series is presented separately. Currently Spring and Summer series are available.
Spring Tide Series
This series came into being in Spring, when nature was exploding all around into its fresh, light new-life colours. I used finely drawn images from an old plant book from the thrift shop to imbue the delicacy of new plant life at this time of year.
Summer in the Park Series
This series came into being purely intuitively. To me they have a lively, summery feel - they were made during summer time. No paint was used, except for the collage papers incorporated in the paintings, that I made using a jelly plate
Experimentations
These stand-alone experimental paintings are inquiries into composition, value, colour and mark making/texture, form and line, rhythm and movement. They are grouped in two batches, according to the different time intervals in which they were made.
Experimentations 1
Experimentations 2
Perpetuum
These paintings are part of concertina (harmonica) sketchbooks. Perpetuum refers to the ongoing nature of concertina booklets (35 pages to and 35 pages fro). With the pages woven together, the work on each page flows naturally into that on the next. This encourages a free way of working. The paintings in these sketchbooks are explorations which can feed into my paintings; they are not for sale.
Realistic
Honesty series
The honesty plant, in its ‘extinguished’ state with its tender, very thin and translucent coins-shaped
remains, dangling on feeble branches and carrying the plant’s seeds, put a spell on me. When the sun shines through them they reveal a myriad of bright and subtle colours. It is an amazing sight. This plant taught me to look better and see more.
Other flora
In this category I combine pastel paintings and drawings of different plants and flowers. Most of them were made in a plant nursery in the neighbourhood where crops and flowers are grown, or on hikes in my environment. I started working on the paintings while on location; I finished them at home aided by the photos I took of the plants or flowers.
Landscape
For these paintings of the African landscape I used water colour. I am still in an exploratory phase of learning to master this medium which I find so beautiful. Interesting enough, while I made no landscape paintings so far in other mediums, I automatically connected landscapes to use of water colour.
