Abstract
India
After a 25 year wait (health issues), in January 2025 I finally made it to India, the long-time nr 1 country on my travel wish list. India proved to be everything I had hoped for, and much more. The abundance of colour, a vast cultural heritage and beautiful, kind people make it an artist's paradise. It was love at first sight. This series is about that first Indian experience.
Butterflies
The paintings in this series are about transformation, a vital aspect of the magic of the creative process. They are about awareness, patience and trust, all required elements for the process to unfold naturally. It's about joy, lightness and freedom in creating, about longing and fulfilment through transformative creation.
African Laughter
Sub-Saharan Africa, where I lived, worked and travelled for over two decades, has made a lasting impression on me. Hence it naturally is a great source of inspiration for my work. I need to paint about it. But how? Africa stands for so much. I am exploring what exactly that is, and how to express how I feel about my past experience there. The project focuses on the Great African Rift Valley area, where I lived longest and travelled most extensively, and where I got my first and most profound African memories from.This series of 8 pieces is the first step on this African journey.
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Scenes of Nature Collage
These semi-abstract paintings are collage works on paper made on the basis of hikes in nature areas around my home town in the Netherlands. While hiking I immersed myself in the natural environment 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) the nature scenes on large sheets of paper. I then tore these sheets into pieces and reassembled them into collage paintings.
Perpetuum
These paintings are snapshots of concertina (accordion) sketchbooks. Perpetuum refers to the ongoing nature of these paintings due to the seemingly never ending concertina booklets (35 pages to and 35 pages fro). The pages being woven together, the work flows naturally from one page to the next, which encourages a free way of working. These sketchbook paintings are explorations which can feed into my paintings.
(They are not for sale.)
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Realistic
Flora
I love flora - trees, plants, flowers - their shapes, lines and colours. My love of the honesty plant (in Dutch: Judaskruid/penning) and of sunflowers, especially when they are in a state of decay, prompted me to create series on both. This Flora category also contains individual paintings and drawings of flowers and crops. All paintings are made with soft pastel, the drawings with charcoal.
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Nomadic portraits
During more than two decades (1989 - 2012) of living, working and traveling in Africa, especially East-Africa/Kenya, I undertook many trips to remote areas. Instantly fascinated by the astonishing and proud looks of the nomadic people I started photographing them. A collection of portraits of people of the various nomadic tribes was the result, including the Maasai, Pokot, Samburu and Turkana. I am adding them to this website as part of the Africa project I am working on.