Paintings 0

Defeated by nature, 2022, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

€160

Dancing in the street, 2022, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

€160

Unfinished masterpiece, 2010-12, oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm

(sold)

Spirits of the sixties (quadriptich), 2011, oil on canvas, 4 x (35 x 40 cm)

€450

The holiday season, 2011, oil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm

During these years I asked people to sit model. Drawing models used to be a large part of art school, but I hadn’t done it for ages. Most artists go to one of those art-model workshops, but, well, you have to pay and you sit there with a bunch of others. Making art is not my most social habit.

So I asked this woman in my then favorite bar De Buurvrouw. She told me to show her I at least had a bit of talent, so I drew her on a beer mat. She didn’t hate it and soon she came to my studio. Now, let’s be honest, I was a bachelor and part of me hoped she would pose naked after a while. But we started out with just the face.

The naked part never happened, but I got just a teensy bit smitten with her. During the many sittings for the portrait I made a photo of her standing on my balcony, watching the green below and the beautiful blue sky. Later, when she had left me, taking her portrait without even paying for the materials (that was more or less the deal), I made a picture of myself on same balcony, but then to her side.

I combined both pictures and one from my recent trip to Texel, one of the seagull that incessantly flew around the boat.

You can see the model is almost crowned with silver . You can also see the pink leaves crawling over the balcony and up my body. The sun is melting. Nevertheless dark skies. It’s a strange kind of Photoshop in paint. What it all means I don’t know. Meaning is derived from watching and contemplating the several objects and colors.

€2400

The holiday season (sketch), 2011, aquarel en pencil on canvas

(sold)

The muse poses, 2011, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

Traditionally a muse is a woman, mostly because it was male hetero artists attracting attention. There’s no conspiracy there. People enjoy what they see and like to paint it. Others enjoy having it on their walls. Keep walking, nothing to see here. There’s no moral obligation for the artist to represent anything else than his or her desires.

A muse could be anyone or anything, as long as it obeys this simple rule: it should be unattainable, while being desired. Close enough to reach for, to touch, but never to be held. Concepts could be a muse (like the muses of yore, the Greek goddesses of the principal arts), as long as the artist believes in them.

Everyone can get a Snickers-bar. Nothing you can buy can function as a true muse. You have to long for it so it can inspire you. Art should be the bridge between you and the unattainable. Often art itself becomes the muse. When it hangs in a museum. So close, yet so far away.

€975

The architect’s decision, 2011, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€975

The painter considers, 2011, oil & charcoal on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€975

The poet speaks, 2011, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€975

Life is simpl, 2011, oil on canvas, 2 x (20 x 35 cm)

€146

Rage of the eyeball kid, 2011, mixed media on cotton, 18 x 30 cm

€95

Shadow of destruction, 2011, mixed media on cotton, 18 x 30 cm

€75

Monet meets Jorn meets Ozymantra (meets Freud), 2011, oil on found printed painting, 71 x 61 cm (with frame)

(not for sale)

The veil, 2011, oil on canvas, 30 x 35 cm

€150

Lucifer redux, 2010, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

My cat stayed with my mother when I finally moved out of the house. When I dropped by with the dirty clothes he was always waiting for me. He was not social, but very loyal. Once he licked my hair completely clean when I sat against the couch. I did have to take a shower after that.

Then I had my first trip to India and somewhere at the height of my travels, when I’d lost all my already loose marbles and went sky up at the uttermost south-point of that marvelous crazy country, when I entered a temple where they were celebrating Gandhi’s birth, my mother apparently had to put him down.

It was the only cat and house pet I’ve ever had and it still smarts sometimes. Like I’d lost a part of myself. As if the bond between us two was finally cut at that marvelous moment in India.

€250

Stilleven met kat, 2010, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

€250

Het gele verdriet, 2010, oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm

€750

Groene dame, 2010, oil on canvas, 60 x 90 cm

(sold)

The glory, 2009, oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm

(sold)

What we all want, 2009, oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm

(sold)

Giorgia, 2008, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€800

Caridad, 2008, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

We’d met in a gallery in New York where I was by accident (actually, an artist that I’d met in another gallery took me there with his car).

She was alone and I decided to chat her up. We had a terribly good conversation. I had to leave her with my bag to get white wine (always white wine!) end later she did the same for me. Trust was built.

We watched a performance of an artwork made by John Cage and Nam June Paik. It was ridiculous and it was funny. A woman dressed up in Chinese garb entered the space, pulling after her a series of children-piano’s on wheels. After that se made incoherent music on one of them.

It was madness, it was uplifting. Everyone had the giggles. No-one took it too serious, but on the other hand, everyone took it serious as a work of art.

After that we followed a crazy Brazilian artist who’s name was also Marcel out of the gallery. It’s always fun to meet interesting and cool Marcels (let’s not talk about the other kind). I drank a Duvel and stole Belgian fries from the plates of others and so did she.

Marcel tried to seduce her with his girlfriend present. I got in the way. I knew Caridad wanted to be with me. I knew that and was so sure.

We lost our company and danced at a place where everybody drank cocktails in highballs. I was the only one ordering beer. She was a lot of fun and, well, ‘what is dancing but makin’ love to music? It was better than a strip-club.

Then we wandered through Manhattan. We kissed, looking for an opportunity, for space to rest. We kissed, but the parks were no parks, just a tree, water and a bench. We kissed again and again. I asked her if we could go to her place. That was in New Jersey and she had a roommate. In my hotel I had four roommates.

There was nothing left to do but rent a new hotel-room. In Hotel Chelsea, not to be mixed up with the famous Chelsea Hotel. What happened there is a story of its own. Maybe one day I will tell. In the morning we said goodbye and I never saw her again.

Unless you count Facebook as seeing someone.

€800

Rachida, 2008, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€800

Entanglement, 2008, oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm

€1200

Mr. Skeletondude, 2006, oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm

(sold)

Monkey see, 2006, oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm

Always that struggle between intellect and our more irrational needs. Biology versus rationality. Enlightenment versus feelings.

We suffer from it, but we also win so much if the two are in balance. Life without reason is just grunting for food and sex in the jungle of unknown threats. Reason without emotions is hardly anything more than a computer program that has no will to act, or enjoy living.

Humans exist on the dichotomy of these two drives. We need to understand, need to control, but also need to let go, to feel free. If our world tips too much to one of these halves of our soul we feel depleted, we feel lacking completeness. It makes us search, to escape restlessness.

We’ve built our civilization as a roof supported by two opposing pillars. it takes all our inventiveness, self discipline and creativity to keep the harmony.

(sold)

Love is in the air, 2006. oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Oh, how often did I think that, R.E.M’s Loosing my Religion was on the radio and I thought: cursed love. You were always escaping me. I was always searching for you in the wrong persons.

We were brought up with this ideal, this idea of love, this television-version of love that could never be true.

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spot-light

It’s an abstraction of something very true, something that’s ethereal, always escaping our grasp. But reality isn’t like that. Reality is concrete, not longing.

Every whisper, of every waking hour
I’m choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you

If it’s like this it isn’t true. Not in the way you want. Then it’s only you longing for completion in a partner. It solipsistic.

Not you and the other, forming a union of good and bad intentions and actions, anger & fear, need & want. Both feeling that the other is important enough to let things slide. To let it go. To love despite living a normal life.

I still love R.E.M., even this song. I like their Americana-ways.

And the bird in the middle with the big feet? That’s a coot. Annoying little self-absorbed fuckers. They only care for their nests and scare even humans away. Even if the nest is on their boat. Go figure.

€1250

Hate is laughter, 2006, oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm

€950

Reaching for Valhalla, 2006, oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm

€950

Annihilating infinity, 2006, oil on canvas, 85 x 65 cm

Sometimes frustration and irritation reach such a high level that you just want to destroy anything in your way. But we are civilized and we don’t do that. Well, we just slap our hand against something or kick the wall.

But what if there was a machine that could destroy the universe? Something that can abolish all of reality? Something like the Ultimate Nullifier, from the comics. For the first time used by Reed Richards to threaten Galactus and prevent him from eating the world.

Would you? Would you annihilate infinity? All of existence, from the beginning with the Big Bang till the end with the Big Crunch. In that one moment of ultimate anger, would you use the Ultimate Nullifier?

€650

Cult of Sebek, 2005, oil on canvas, 45 x 65 cm

€350

The red bird, 2005, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm

€250

Booty, 2005, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm

€250

De tulp, 2005, oil on canvas, 40 x 25

€125

The fury, 2002-2006, oil on canvas, 52 x 52 x 24 cm

€350

A sister’s prayer, 2002, oil & tape on canvas, 101 x 104 x 19 x 0,2 cm

€650

Bird’s eye view, 2001-18, oil on shoebox, tape, purfoam

(sold)

Sunset (box), 2001, oil & tape on carboard box, 48 x 39 x 17 cm

€175

De wrekende engel, 2001, oil & tape on cardboard box, 40 x 60 x 13 cm

€175

Regnum Femina (sketch), 2002, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 0,2 x 9 cm

€375

Orange can be hard, 2002, 70 x 70 x 16 cm

€375

Cold city, 2002, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 5 cm

€350

Vondelparkblues, 2002, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 5 cm

€350

De baadsters (last resort), 2002, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 5 cm

(sold)

Vondelpark victorie, 2001, oil on canvas 85 x 85 x 4,5 cm

In a world never made by her she is victorious

€450

Model III, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 6 cm

(sold)

Model II, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 6 cm

€250

Model I, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 x 6 cm

€250

Million dollar maiden, 2001, 70 x 80 cm

€250

The lady approaches, 2001, oil on canvas, 55 x 85 cm

(sold)

Female Christ, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

€350

Mechanic Madonna, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

€350

Savior, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

€350

Black Star Babe, 2001, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

I do have an infatuation with superheroes. They’re the modern equivalent of the Greek & Roman Gods. They’re the imagination of having real physical powers.

It’s no wonder they mostly appeal to kids and teenagers, because they’re the one’s still dreaming and the one’s who don’t know their limits. They are also the one’s who feel physically and psychologically inferior to each other and to adults. The imagination of having some kind of superpower can help alleviate the stressful feeling of growing up.

So I came to this idea: what if only women had superpowers? Mostly caused by cybernetic enhancements. They would be as goddesses, hovering above the fray, free from the male gaze and their physical violence.

It’s just a fantasy. A way of playing with reality, seeing what the options are, how things could be different.

€750

Godin, 2001, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

(sold)

Rocksteady, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

(sold)

Givenchy Vercingetorix, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

(sold)

Rosselini, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

(sold)

When I’ll streak, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

€350

When titans clash, 2001, oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm

(private collection)

Storm, 2000, oil on canvas, 45 x 85 cm

€300

Legalize dope, 2000, oil on canvas, 45 x 85 cm

€300

Wiskes vlucht, 2000, oil on canvas, 45 x 65 cm

€300

Jaws Ontheground, 2000, oil on canvas, 45 x 65 cm

€300

Baissons mon derriere, 2000, oil & photo on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

€300

Eric is een klitoris, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

(sold)

Alleen meisjes, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

€300

Vrouwenstem, 2000, oil & photo on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

€300

Stamgeest, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

(sold)

Pippi Langkous’s wraak, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

€300

Christie, 2000, olieverf op doek, 70 x 170 cm

(sold)

Writing on the wall, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 170 cm

After a while creating space on canvas got boring, even though I was quite creative with it. I also finally discovered Jean-Michel Basquiat, the prodigy from the eighties.

They say that when he was young he was a graffiti-artist, but that’s not true. He painted poems on the walls of New York City. He did that with visual grace, but it was never the one-direction obsession of the mates he ran with in those days. Before graffiti was surrounded with a certain glamour.

During school I even had a short rambunctious evening of spraying paint on a low wall next to school, together with two class-mates.

I wanted to approach the canvas as if it was a wall and I was all the different graffiti-artists in one that you could find on such a wall.

Here two of my loves find a way of meeting: fashion models and comics-art. I still used the letter-stencils, even more profusely than in the previous period.

€800

Two tower tango, 2000, oil on canvas, 70 x 170 cm

€600

Amandla, 2000, oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

€900

Air, 2000, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

(sold)

Geisha chorus, 2000, oil on canvas, 130 x 140 cm

(sold)

Missing June, 2000, oil on canvas, 90 x 90 cm

(sold)

The army, 2000, oil & crayon on canvas, 60 x 70 cm

€300

Lucie & Illusie, 2000, oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm

€350

Illuminations, 2000, oil on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

€600

Me Tarzan, 1999, oil on canvas, 155 x 155 cm

(sold)

We could be dancing, 1999, oil on canvas, 210 x 140 cm

(sold)

Vermicelli fugaza, 1999, oil on canvas, 100 x 155 cm

€800

Tekens, 1999, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

€800

Square park mambo, 1999, oil on canvas, 140 x 140

(sold)

Die hemelse blues, 1999, oil on canvas, 105 x 140 cm

(sold)

Mambo zombie, 1999, oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm

€175

Descendre ici, 1999, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm

(sold)

Stille straat, 1999, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm

€200

Ik, mens – zelfportret naar Dürer, 1999, oil on canvas, 75 x 85 cm

Not for sale

Alleen de vogels, 1999, oil on canvas, 55 x 75 cm

€200

Er zijn drie sirenes, 1999, oil on canvas, 75 x 55 cm

€200

Zandvoort aan zee. 1999, oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm

Zandvoort at sea

As these small texts accompanying the paintings slowly turn out to be autobiographical sketches I guess sometimes I should tell of the lesser things. Things that annoyed me, things that I did wrong.

The latter will get its chance, maybe even in the one’s I’ve scribbled already, but the first is a complaint I’ve kept to myself for too darnedest long: the way this painting was sold.

An acquaintance of mine, actually my then current boss, wanted to buy one of my paintings. He’d decided on another one than this, we’d agreed on a price. Everything was hunky dory.

But when I got in time for the deal in my studio he was already there. He sat in my chair, with Zandvoort in front of him. He’d suddenly decided on this one. Too flabbergasted I agreed. I could use the damn money, that was for sure.

Only later I realized this one I’d prized higher than his previous choice. Especially sad considering this is indeed an excellent piece of that period (one about which he insists to everyone in our vicinity when we meet that it is actually my best painting).

I can only sell a painting once. I don’t do series. Everything is totally unique, a desperate experiment with my creative force.

About the specifics. Zandvoort is the closest real beach near Amsterdam and het Gooi, the region that I was raised. Zandvoort’s reputation has a certain magical quality that appealed to me. Just to be annoying I wrote “Watr” in the sky (deliberate wrong spelling) and “Luct” in the water (lucht = air).

I never mentioned this story to the buyer. He’s such a delightfully optimistic man. And I do feel its important my art is on someone’s wall. That’s when it really starts growing. As if your kids finally leave house. Every owner adds another layer of story to the art.

(sold)

Sparkleboy, 1999, oil and photo on canvas, 70 x 65 cm

Babyboom, oil & photo on canvas, 80 x 50 cm

€175

Bland land, 1999, oil, photo on canvas, 70 x 40 cm

The low-countries are fun, in some ways. What seems like endless stretches of ‘polder’ (reclaimed land) and could be easily experienced as dreadfully boring, has in the mind of the Dutch a mystical quality. As if that is where the nation originates. As if the ‘boer’ (farmer) is the heart of the country.

The famous long epic poem called ‘Mei’ (May) by Herman Gorter elicits the feeling of a primordial Lowlands perfectly. You almost start to believe the Dutch themselves would be imaginative dreamers.

Unfortunately only a small segment of the population suffers from this. The rest prefers to be ‘nuchter’ (prosaic, business-like, matter of fact). Only in that way the country was able to reclaim so much land on the sea. It’s what accounts for their unshakeable self-confidence. But please don’t throw any dragons in there!

Another Dutch writer, Multatuli, invented the perfect character to represent this primordial Dutch feeling: Droogstoppel (dry stubble). The man couldn’t think his way out of an audits if it would save his life. Of course, Multatuli was quite disliked during his life. It didn’t help that he had a very strong stance against the Dutch occupation of what is now known as Indonesia.

€150

Ghost in the machine, 1999, oil, photo, drawing (on paper) on canvas, 80 x 60 cm

It turned out that having a subject to paint, looking for freedom in art, I was gradually experimenting more and more.

Let’s not forget, I hardly had any background in the arts. I was starting from scratch. The act of using photographs, news-paper-paper and, as in this case, parts of old drawings I’d made for art-school, felt very liberating. Everything could be used to express my feelings and ideas.

I could even quit painting halfway through the painting and imbue that absence with meaning.

€175

Geel, 1999, oil & newspaper on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

Yellow

Lauren Bacall is one of those really special famous women. Both known for her acting skills as her beauty. Even if I haven’t seen all her movies I’m impressed by her countenance. She and Humphrey Bogart were the Bennifer of their times, if Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck were any good as actors (that’s nasty towards Affleck, I know). His current on-off mate J-Lo has more of an actor’s pedigree than Aniston, in my opinion.

I enjoy famous beautiful women and I still enjoy incorporating them in my work. They add some mystery, something extra special to a painting. Being glamorous isn’t a sin. She wants to lead the glamorous life / But without love, it ain’t much, as Sheila E sang in that song which is so much a part of my youth, ‘The Glamorous Life, Part1’.

In a way Bacall is a metaphor for the longing that we suffer under. Wanting a good and even better life.

(sold)

Liften is een berg, 1999, oil & photo on canvas, 120 x 115 cm

Hitchhiking is a mountain

When I lived in Purmerland (a tiny hamlet above Amsterdam, right under Purmerend), I lived on a small farm with a very upbeat queer. The buses from Purmerend quit after a certain hour. Then I went a-walking and now and then had the luck of being picked up.

Another time which must’ve happened not long before this painting I hitched with a woman friend to Copenhagen. Two days going, two days there and two back. It was clear that everyone preferred to stop for her. Also only people who had hitched when they were young picked us up. The German roads were terrific and terrifying at the same time. We drove with a very fast car (180 km/s) and were easily overtaken by a BMW.

When we arrived in Copenhagen my woman friend discovered that she had forgotten the address and number of the girl we were supposed to meet. Fortunately she and her friends just barged into the train-station before I could have a freak-out.

Last time I’ve hitched since was from Monterey to the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. That turned out to be a big bookshop with just a lot of Miller. Still, it was awesome to be there. Many years later I finished ‘Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch’. Finally I could add up what I observed with Miller’s luscious descriptions of his living circumstances. Worth it.

(sold)

Jij ochtend, 1999, oil & photo on canvas, 80 x 50 cm

You morning

In the right corner we see the same building as in ‘Iedereen droomt’. It was called De Nieuwe Silo. You guessed it, the new silo. There was an old silo, further on the right, but I haven’t used that in any paintings, I think.

The New Silo was interesting for several reasons. One that it was a damn impressive building. Especially the tower. On that side also was painted in giant letters Amandla, which is Xhosa/Zulu for ‘power’. I knew it from the UB40-song Sing Our Own Song. Amandla Awethu: Power to the people.

but they also had great parties in those days, SOD: Shock of Daylight. You went in the evening, raved on House, chilled downstairs, and in the morning you got exited the building on the waterside, when the sun rose.

I think the owner has moved to Hong Kong or Singapore, which means one of my paintings should be in Asia.

(sold)

Volendam, 1999, oil, newspaper, photocopy on canvas, 80 x 60 cm

Volendam is a small fisher-town in the west of Noord-Holland, which is a province of the Netherlands in the north-east. I know it’s complicated, but you’ll get the hang of it. The Netherlands are not much stranger than any other country. You only see it when you’re not from there. To us it all seems perfectly normal.

in Volendam lived a boy who couldn’t find his beat in town. He was part of the very closely knit community, but he had other ideals, and, like with so many regular folks, those ideals didn’t agree with them. So he and his friends had this, well, kind of mini-revolution in the middle of the nineties. That’s when I met him. He was a classmate.

Together we invented this art movement called demorfism. I’ve posted a few demorfistic paintings somewhere down here. It was a very inspirational and formative period for me, as it was for him. After school we drifted apart.

I didn’t see him until I heard he’d died. He would’ve been fifty this year. You can see his picture in the bottom left of the painting.

We’ve published some of his magnificent paintings in our magazine Sintel, #6. The only other place you can see them is in Volendam, with his family and some of his friends.

He severely disliked the internet. Who doesn’t, right? If you’re healthy you should severely dislike the internet. It can be useful, but its terribly harmful without any limits, because humanity refuses to put any limits on it.

€175

Goedemorgen!, 1999, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm

Good morning

€175

Hete zomer II, 1999, oil & photo on canvas, 150 x 110 cm

Hot Summer II

in true expressionist style I searched for motives and themes that were elemental and recognizable. They should be able to express the heavy emotions I carried.

A complicated way to explain why the images were so simple: summer, who doesn’t like summer, right? And who hasn’t had that moment in a beating sun that you feel like all that’s left is a sweltering mind.

Sometimes the actual surroundings can be so overwhelming that the body retreats completely. You’re left with your thoughts as lonely companions.

Sometimes when I’m sunbathing it can feel like that. Sometimes when I’m walking through snow and cold wind it can be like that. Sometimes it’s very nice to be nowhere at all, have no cares but to move.

(sold)

Stille nacht, 1999, oil, newspaper & photo on canvas, 140 x 130 cm

Silent night

The night of Amsterdam, in black & white, with its warm windows where people live cozy lives behind their televisions. I’d seen it so often, wandering through the streets, looking for an accidental meeting that would break the tedium. Stoned, broke, cold (this feels like a winter-painting, of course), watching the buildings, photographing with my mind’s eye the surroundings. I felt sometimes like a human camera.

I told a tourist I’d met in India that I loved art and was always looking, checking, seeing what the world was made out of. She thought that was quite a dreary living. For her it seemed like a drudge being on guard all the time.

it was not only for my art, but also a cautiousness about the world, my precariousness, that I watched everything like a hawk. I needed to be careful. Everything could end every moment.

€500

Het verlangen, 1999. oil & photo on canvas, 150 x 110 cm

The longing

It’s always a pleasure to play with a contrarian point of view. From right to left, like Japanese do in their manga. Your eye goes from Isabella Rossellini, into the white, the back of the figure with a brown front that looks into a dark half-circle with small windows. When you look further to the left you see green pastures, which contrast with the fuchsia city-scape on the right.

You could argue that the longing is for the green, but because of the contrarian view it might be interpreted as nothing but nostalgia: a longing for something in the past that seems better, but is hardly anything more than a fleeting memory.

As with the preceding two paintings letters recur as if stamped. I was using cut-out paper to stencil them. This way there finally was some concrete shape in the paintings, which I’d struggled with since long before. Later it would evolve in an almost rococo approach, where the meaning of words got lost in the stenciling, metamorphosing into strange patterns. Afterwards I’ve dubbed that phase ‘letters-vermicelli’.

(sold)

De stad droomt in bloed, 1999, oil & photo on canvas, 140 x 110 cm

The city dreams in blood

I was searching for a way to depict the city as I knew it. Not geographically, but emotional. Also to how to show multiple dimensions of actual reality. In the preceding ‘Summer’-collection I was already searching for a solution. Something to fit the several planes of existence and the wholeness of the city within the certain strict fixtures of bottom and top of the canvas.

Again I used cut-outs from fashion-magazines. I had collected a bunch. It was very instructive to read about the then-current femmisphere and women´s surface-care. I had a long fun evening watching a beauty pageant with my then girlfriend – each in our own house, chatting through the telephone. These magazines were better

Thanks to the sisters of my mother’s husband I got an exhibition at Hewlett-Packard in… Amstelveen(?) and they bought the painting. Hopefully it’s still somewhere in the collection.

(sold)

Iedereen droomt, 1999, oil and photo on canvas, 70 x 55 cm

Everyone Dreams

A period of intense darkness was ending with this painting. I really had to work myself out of a depressing period in which I nevertheless learned an awful amount of interesting things. Both about myself and about the world.

The left arrow points to the right at the silhouette of Spider-Man, but also as in a gesture of ‘moving on’. . Left is also my first attempt at painting realistic, from a photo of Lady Miss Kier, front-woman of Dee-Lite, a very nice band that had a big hit with Groove Is In The Heart. It’s already an old song by then – released in 1990 – and I had the CD ever since, but using her in a painting felt like a new, refreshing start. Somewhat right from the middle I’ve pasted a cut-out picture of a model. Behind her stands the schematically drawn Nieuwe Silo, a place to dance on house and rave. Furthermore you see lots of unpainted canvas, which was a new thing for me to do.

I tried to state something about reality and unreality by juxtaposing the paint and the photo. Was that a critique of my own wandering ways in the preceding years? About all my adventures in psychedelics, weed and drinking? I had a new studio (later that year I would get a new house) and a new girlfriend. I guess it really felt like a new day was born.

€250

Moi (zelfportret met groene zonnebril), 1999, oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm

Moi (self-portrait with green sun glasses)

It had become my custom to paint a self-portrait every so many years. This one was the conclusion to many years of living at the seamy side of life. I had finished Art School and rented a small studio not far away from my house.

In the background we see a burning city, something that should be considered a symbol, not an actual fact. It felt in the years before as if the city was burning, as if I was burning up. That’s probably the reason why the portrait and the background are in such cold colors. I was burning up from the passions, the visions, the craziness from my life, but I had to be cold and strong to withstand it.

The sunglasses were so-called welding-goggles that I’d bought at the local hardware store. When growing up I more or less ignored my surroundings. Going to Art School forced my eyes wide open and made me see too much. The world became this kaleidoscope of light and shape. Considering the painting a symbol of the end of this period it feels like the sun-glasses signify a need to see less so I would be be able to start functioning as a human being, not a registration machine.

(not for sale)

De vogel en de man

(sold)

Het concert, 1998, oil on canvas,

(sold)

Het concert (schets), 1998, oil on canvas, 83 x 50 cm

The concert (sketch)

this was about the first thing I made in the new studio at the Juliana Hospital, a squat in Amsterdam, not very far from where I lived, in west. On the top floor was the studio and living of one of Herman Brood’s assistants, and in another room lived a future girlfriend, I think. Or maybe she wasn’t there yet. I often met her later on with her dog and blua dyed hair.

the woods for this painting have a peculiar measurement because I didn’t but it, but got it off some other artist.

The basis for this depiction was a concert by the Rollins Band on A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise, or Lowlands, probably the 1994 edition. That concert already was inspiration for a tryptic much earlier on at school, but I had to redo it somehow in this new environment.

I rarely sketched something beforehand on the canvas, but this time I did so. It was very nice smooth surface which made everything easier. I used to buy my linen at the Albert Cuyp Market, Which was coarse and a bit lumpy. Now it was different. apparently I outdid myself.

It made for a very fine painting experience. What was intended to be a sketch for a bigger painting turned out to be the basis for more mature and focused brush-works. It really marked a difference in which I approached oil-paint.

€450

Der engel, 1998, oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm

In Korsakoff worked a lady bartender that I was a bit smitten with. She was rude, blonde, had a sharp smile and was a bitch in general. That’s not just me saying, it was also written on her t-shirt: BITCH.

When she danced she occupied the room with gestures and small movements of her pelvis. Nobody dared to interrupt her. In my mind I started to call her Der engel, after the Rammstein song.

In this painting she’s represented by the yellow figure. All the others are representations of different moods and characters within Korsakoff, a bit like with the Disney movie ‘In and Out’

Of course the real ‘engel’ – angel – appears in the five spotlights above the dance floor.

Many years into nightlife (I was loosing interest in Korsakof), she once crossed the empty dance floor running and kissed me on the mouth. That was the closest I ever got to what I wanted from her. It should be enough.

€250

Rammstein, 1998, oil on canvas, 60 x 110 cm

From memory to semi-abstract. The dark and light planes do the dance. they change place in the spotlights. Bodies reduced to surprising conjunctions.

The bellybutton is indeed observed reality, but there’s also a designed hawkish nose from some Aztec god. The tuft of red was real, her bangs. She was tall and slender.

Every time anything Goth came on there were these girls who did a kind of Vogue. Of all of them she seemed do be a force of nature.

I admit working on this after the fact. There was an earlier version that contained only a small part of satisfaction. The original impetus of the beginning, the processing of artistic influences, got a bit lost in this last version.

But I didn’t mention the band yet. The first time I heard Rammstein was in the 1997 David Lynch movie Lost Highway. It left a devastating impression. I later used the intro of ‘Engel’ in a poetry performance for the VPRO-radio. Don’t try to look it up. It’s awful.

€300

Schoenen (naar van Gogh), 1998, oil on canvas

Shoes (after Van Gogh)

Anybody who knows his art history recognizes this painting from another artist, Vincent van Gogh. He painted his shoes in his Neunen-period, when he worked mostly in browns and blacks. His famous The Potatoe Eaters (1885) is also from that period.

When I made this I didn’t know much about Van Gogh, except that he was the reason most Dutch didn’t buy paintings. They considered poor artists the only real ones. Oh, and that everyone seemed to adore Van Gogh, but hardly knew other modern artists.

But his shoe-painting was fascinating. He generally moved from one city to the other by walking, sleeping in a ditch when it took too long. Of course that’s an amazing thing, but I have the idea many people traveled like that before the introduction of the common bicycle.

It’s not that I ever walked such distances, but it sure felt like it sometimes. I was also dirt poor as I imagine Van Gogh was. Except that I bought these really neat Nike Sneakers with such a big logo that you hardly notice it’s there.

Painting these in the typical Van Gogh style felt like an ironic comment on my self-chosen path of the peintre maudit in an age of extreme wealth. It’s a pun on myself and a comment on the sanctification of Vincent van Gogh, a man who never had the chance to enjoy the riches his paintings brought in.

Residing at the house of an old schoolmate somewhere in the Netherlands.

(sold)

IJzeren rijder, 1998, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

Iron Rider

In the nineties I used to go to this alternative dance hole called Korsakoff. At the height of its success it consisted out of three stories. The first floor was covered with checkered linoleum, had a large bar and dance area. Second floor was mostly bar with a Terminator pinball machine. That’s where they played al kinds of heavy rock. On the third they played different dark electronic dance.

During a period of three years I lived quite nearby and hardly had any money. I went there about four times a week, smoked a joint and danced till the end of the evening. for beers I depended on the kindness of strangers.

Sometimes as I arrived on my bicycle I imagined being a knight returning to his town, with all the people on the street chatting, smoking and drinking. Hardly a part of the community since I almost never talked to anyone, I felt nevertheless welcome and wonderful.

€150

Blauwe lippen, 1999, oil on canvas, 50 x 80 cm

Blue lips

In that haze of alcohol and weed the customers of Korsakoff sometimes morphed into a thick paste of brown and black, with the occasional shine of orange hued skin and the shrieking blare of white light from behind the counter. To see a girl there with cap backwards and blue painted lips in a snarl can rouse the painters eye to new heights.

For some strange reason I put her outside, during the day, in the neighborhood of my mother’s house, as can be witnessed by the streetlight in the back. She’s got a tattoo that I’d used on other paintings which originated from the printing classes at our art school.

The primitive sparse style was caused by my suddenly increased interest in the German expressionist style of the 1910’s and 20’s of which Kirchner and Jawlensky mostly caught my eye. It just had to be filtered through my Romantic Amsterdam Alt-Rock-Goth nineties eyes.

At the same time it was a reflection and reaction on the much sunnier and optimistic paintings that preceded them.

€175

Bitches in heat, 1998, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

Korsakoff was far from the only place I went to in the nineties. San Francisco was another. Adjacent to the Red Ligh District it was the late night stand for pimps, hookers, criminals and other derelicts. When everything else in the neighborhood was closed you still could get a nice beer served by a real Amsterdam wench with large cleavage and tiger print leggings.

The place was devoid of inhibition. Every nook and cranny breathed hormones. There were always older women looking for young guys and vice versa. The prostitutes enjoyed themselves like normal people, Finally able to set the standards of conduct for others.

The title Bitches in Heat seems denigrating , but in our hearts we were all bitches in heat, since everything that whole evening in different establishments was about getting laid and in San Francisco it just lost all of its pretense. You knew what you got there, everyone knew what you wanted. It was plain lust for all to see.

€175

Het laatste uur II, 1999, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

The last hour II

Just as with The Tattoo I felt the need to redo the painting in a different color palette. Now it’s more that last hour of the night, when almost everyone has left but you and, well, that dude. The guy who’s going to kick you out.

What is it that makes that we’re sometimes too stubborn to know better? when you’ve consumed so much alcohol that even the fun has stopped being fun but you still think you have fun? What about sober life isn’t so much fun that you decide to hide in a maze of alcoholic thoughts?

They say that you become a bit of stupid with alcohol. Does stupidity make life more bearable? Would we like to be as animals, who don’t have a care because they immediately forget their worries and just act on instinct? It might be a crime of the utmost cruelty to one day make animals conscious of themselves.

€300

Het laatste uur I, 1997, oil on canvas, 110 x 75 cm

The Last Hour

It’s that time again: the bar closes, the concert finishes, the light’s turned on. All night you’ve seen everyone in a rosy light that doesn’t show wrinkles. The mind is something of a hallucination machine. With enough stimulation it projects a film of beauty and desire on the faces around you.

Mind you, this always happens, even if you’re not drunk or stoned. All of us project our mind’s reality on the surrounding world. Maybe that’s were the saying “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It originates.

But in real life the light is rarely turned on to show the monsters that a moment ago were still so lovely and mysterious.

(sold)

The Tattoo 2, 1999, oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm

It felt like I wasn’t done with the subject of a beer drinking tattooed man. So I had to paint it again, this time with more attention for other details.

In the time passing from the first version till this one I became interested in a different color pallet. More subtle and refined. The tattoo was reduced to a design I’d made for a course at the art school. The woman in the background had to be of her own world, contrasting her reds with the greens of the foreground. It made her passionate and him more . All his passion was reduced to his beer, that seems to seethe with anger.

The first version harbored a lot of violence, but this one sighs under the inside turmoil, all of which is implied. Thus it became more distanced from the observed reality that informed the esthetics of the first version.

The quite simple story of the contrasting figures was mostly informed by Edvard Munch’s works like The Sick Child (1885-1886) or The Artist and His Model (1921). Here he lets the juxtaposition of the figures do the most work. They don’t interact, but just exist next to each other. It’s the audience that applies story.

It now has a nice home in Savage, Minnesota, USA.

(sold)

The tattoo 1, 1997, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

In the nineties tattoo´s were mostly for sailors, criminals and certain music lovers. You saw all three of those in dance hole Korsakoff, though I would never have recognized a sailor for real, mind you.

My father had a sailboat, but we never left the cozy fresh waters of the Netherlands. Closest we got to a storm was in the Ketelmeer, a small lake near Urk that can be quite hellish when the wind is wrong. That´s the only time my mother decided it was enough and she left the boat with me and my sister to take the train home.

Tattoo´s still held a certain magic in my eyes and I mostly associated them with the wild nightlife of punkrock music and dope users. The person on the painting does resemble in hairdo and expression someone I often saw in Korsakoff, but this painting was not meant for recognition, just as a symbol. The woman in the back harkens back to another establishment, Patapoe, in which I was a close witness and participant to one of the more colorful scenes of nineties Amsterdam.

€300

Het ziekbed (…en de bloedfee), 1995, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

The sickbed (…and the blood-fairy)

I rarely get sick. That’s still as true as it used to be when I was younger. I’ve started calling in sick at work once in while because otherwise it would get a bit unbelievable.

Also, I occasionally would like to enjoy the same benefits as colleagues and be out of the workplace from time to time. Even if it is only faux-sickness.

When I had this terrible flu I lived in an unheated attic in Amsterdam-West. Heavy with fever I sat in front of my painting (I painted everyday) and started with a strong hand, though every fiber of the rest of my body trembled.

I painted the mid-part, the ghostly colors that resemble tittle demons, the trees and the distorted houses (those last were really a staple of my days) extremely concentrated. The sick orange face and white blanket came too. After that I dropped for dead in my bed and dreamed feverishly about Iris.

When I woke up the next day the fever was broken and I painted the right-side figure. You can see I hardly have any concentration for that.

Sarajevo, 1994, oil on hardboard, 2 x (38 x 62)

The war in Yugoslavia came as a terrible shock. I’d had visions of darkness and chaos in Europe of the Second World-war. My grandparents would always talk about that time (father’s side was in Indonesia and mother’s side was here in the Netherlands) and my parents and television; a large amount of time and talk was filled with WW2 . It seemed like all of that came back: Europe was at siege again. I stopped watching television and especially the news for at least the first half of the decade.

It didn’t help that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana committed suicide (who’s music had a great impact on me) and that my then-girlfriend Rachida ditched me for an older male-model at school. Ours was quite a tumultuous relationship (my first GF), but when it finished in such a harsh way (the rest of the class knew long before me, I’d even drawn the bastard) it more or less shattered me.

Ziener, 1994, oil-paint on a plasticized wooden panel 42 x 108 cm

Seer

I kept feeling I should update the content of art. The small map in the background indicates the character isn’t a real seer, but a weatherman. For me weathermen represented something magical. Though I quite understood the science behind such things, it seemed like they were revered as if they really could predict the future. At the bottom are flaming non-letters from a invented languafe I would use up until these days. It means nothing, but implicates something is said.

My then current painting teacher said this painting testified to something of a virtuoso. He wasn’t very known for his compliments, so I carried that remark for quite a long while with me (maybe still, I’m not sure).

Houseparty, 1994, oil on canvas, 90 x 30 cm

Dancing, yes, that is one of the greatest joys in life. Not the dance of rules, but dancing as a free person, in free expression, following the beat, following the harmony, or just some click in your head. Finding the space in your body to move your joints in any particular way that gives pleasure. It’s something I gradually discovered in life, but makes me feel more alive than many other things.

Of course a group of dancers in such a free way means disharmony and, as my teacher said with De schaatsers, you should avoid disharmony in a one-paneled artwork. Screw that. right? The brush follows the music, the music dictates the movement. For what is dancing but making love set to music?

it’s a theme that will return often and has found it’s way in how I move the brush, how I apply paint. Many a painting solely exists in that specific shape because of the music I was listening to. Isn’t a Pollock-painting anything more then a dance with paint?

Pacman, 1994, oil on canvas, 100 x 35 cm

Yes, I got to know art and art-history a bit, and of course I thought it could use some updating. Why always those old-time subjects like models, dirty streets and mandolin-players?

That wasn’t my life, that’s not how my surroundings were. I was a suburban kid on the brink of the digital age. I thought this needed representation in the arts and especially in painting, even if I did paint kind of old-fashioned for those days.

You know what? I did paint old-fashioned, but I had a lot to catch up to, so I started at the beginning, with nice bright colors and glaced surfaces. Why else did I have zinc whit then to cover a black surface so it would look a bit more… painterly?

Note the ‘characters’, though. It was all about love for me, mostly unrequited love in those days. So we have the orange heart on the left, the yellow heart on the right and Pacman hunting us. Love is a battlefield.

De schaatsers, 1994, oil on canvas, 102 x 109 cm

The ice skaters

Being young and discovering the possibilities of the single panel (as opposed to the multiple panel of comics) made me ambitious. I thought I could really add new things. The most important would be of course some typical Dutch culture. Like ice-skating, for example.

The teacher managed as his most important remark that the suggestion of movement as is the case with the right figure was not appreciated in the fine arts. That I did so must’ve been influence from the comics I read. Sequential art is nothing but movement, that’s how a fictional world is created with pictures.

I do get that now. He will always keep falling, which brings continuous disharmony. Something that especially classically trained artists detest. After all, disharmony breaks the spell of perfection.

On the other hand, when you look at works by Pollock or Appel you will constantly see the suggestion of movement. The splatter of paint in motion. More importantly, it’s arrested motion. The movement of the brush is forever engraved on the canvas. A thing that’s been a part of my work since a long time by now – arrested time in motion – but reduced to the painterly brush stroke, not necessarily falling figures.

Side-note: The left character seems to have an avian look to head and arms. I was developing these birdlike humans in printing class (the old fashioned kind of printing, mind you, not ‘printers’ as in computers). I have absolutely no clue anymore what the impetus for that direction was. Maybe a way to deviate from my too pronounced and naive approach to the human face?

Kubie geeft de geest, 75 x 101 cm, oil on sheet, 1994

Kubie gives the ghost

Every hero needs an origin story. Spider-Man got bitten by a radioactive spider, Achilles was born from Peleus and the goddess Thetis and Joan of Arc got visions from archangel Michael.

In a way I’ve always felt like a hero in defying my family’s and society’s norms by pursuing the arts. We didn’t do that. We got a nice and cozy job, went on vacations, to birthdays and payed our taxes on time. We would never be so outrageous to expect to create beauty of any kind.

I do admit feeling affinity with Western heroes like James Bond or Luke Skywalker, but as I’m getting older I sometimes fear my life might be more like a Greek tragedy, with heroes like Perseus or Orestes. Any day now I could poke out my eyes and live in poverty until death, never to be recognized as an artist. I’ve seen it goddamn happen!

This painting was my first on canvas. Well, uhm, a bed sheet. It’s made at school and the end result of many a grueling lesson in something that I could hardly comprehend: art. I wás admitted to the school, that much is true, but I didn’t have any background in the arts, neither did anyone in my family. I was almost a blank slate, like an unpainted canvas.

The only kind of previous art education were European comic strips, American comics, two reproductions on the wall of my family’s house (Dali and Escher) and a large forest-scape in thick paint at my grandparents house.

Oh, I did make two issues of a small comics-magazine when I was twelve or something, with horribly childish drawings and later on I published a magazine called ‘Project. uhmm…’ with a friend, which featured many starting Dutch comics artists and every time a story by me. The art did develop quite well, but I knew I had to learn more, which was the sole reason why I went to Art School in the first place. You can find some of the magazine here: http://www.zinbedcomics.org/

But about art I didn’t know much. That I had to learn on the spot, so I listened to the teachers and talked a lot with my classmates. The one from painting had the habit to point with his foot at our works on the floor and say ‘This part I like’. I collected all those remarks in one painting (not this one) and he liked it!

After that it became easier. I still had no clue about what I did, but at least I’d made some headway. The culmination of that particular odyssey was ‘Kubie geeft de geest’ (mentioning Cubism – of which I had fleeting knowledge and punning on a Dutch saying – giving the ghost is like falling unconscious or dying, in the painting represented as something more literal. Look at the orange figure, an organic form seems to escape it’s head).

It’s painted on a bed sheet stretched over wood I’d split with a breadknife, fastened with decorative nails because I thought that’s how it was done.

The teachers critique on previous work often came down to that it lacked form, so I thought it would be real artsy to make a painting with a lot of square characters. Of course there had to be a certain muscle definition and of course I used the orange character in more works as my stand-in. After all, I was brought up with mostly comics, I still needed a mask for my art.