Paintings I

Atomic, 2024, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm

An FB-friend had a raving post about ‘Picture This’, by Blondie. That evening I decided to put the ‘Best of…’ in the cd-player (no internet allowed in the studio) and started painting.

The subject is quite simple, I think. Technology and art. Technology and society. Being a robot and a chip-circuit in one, eye-moving colors.

I like the tension between the orange and the background of sand-blue. Or is that red? I was aiming for a color that would attract attention being ambiguous. In the real painting it’s even more acrid.

O, and why start about Blondie? Because of the title. I couldn’t think of anything else that would suite the painting. Music and art are my secret hand-in-hand mistresses. It’s a threesome almost every evening.

€600

Illuminations: Mistique – Le douceur fleuries des etoiles, 2024, oil and spray paint on canvas, 40 x 95 cm

€875

Illuminations: Vagabonds – Primitif de fils du soleil, 2024, oil and spraycan on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

€775

Jamie’s Choice III, oil on canvas, 2023, 40 x 60 cm

€625

Kama reaches Shiva and shoots an arrow of desire, 2023, oil and spraypaint on canvas, 60 x 90 cm

€1350

Ich will kein engel sein, 2023, oil and spraypaint on canvas, 67 x 81 cm

Again Korsakoff, again thoughts and reveries about how everything was better before. Painting can bring back to those days. Like a time-machine, simultaneous building and transporting. In the end you’re still here, in the now that’s ever fleeting, always turning future into past.

Der engel, I will never see you again and even if I do, you’ve changed and so have I. Somewhere in the eternal hologram of the mind you dance and I watch, until one day I say hi and you smirk.

Korsakoff has disappeared. It had to close after its owner couldn’t do it anymore. A tragic disease had siphoned off all his energy. Or was it that the times were changing? I stood outside at one of the last days, talking to two boys of 21, who’d never been there before. They were amazed you could go in without paying.

But isn’t the time they are changing anything else than the new generation, new ethics and ideas, feelings and sentiments? We ourselves are the time changing.

For many kids the eighties are a time to long for, a time of magic. I’ve lived it. Believe me, it wasn’t all that. The nineties on the other hand, yeah, they were magical, but that’s the time I really grew up. From a wallflower into a sunflower, albeit a dark one, with sharp leaves.

€1375

She likes to have a smoke after sex, 2023, oil on wood, 123 x 89 cm

€2350

Wind and the beach, 2023, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€2350

Iris Smile, 2023, oil and spray-paint on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

Revisiting themes from my past, I got to coffeeshop The Fatal Flowers from the mid-nineties and my then heartthrob Iris. She’d figured already on the schoolpainting ‘Het ziekenbed (…en de bloedfee)’ and some drawings which can be found here. There was need for a renewed vision of that extraordinary girl and our surroundings.

It started out as a pretty realistic painting of her sitting on the bench in The Fatal Flowers, but I couldn’t translate that image from the sketch to the canvas. Something was lost in that version. A certain power and mystique was lacking. The daily haze of weed and hash consummation was missing.

I guess by that time too much was invested in the painting itself to just stick with a figure. I needed a way to depict my inner turmoil, the power of that emotion called love, which by then was akin to possessiveness. The painting needed to feel more primal, like a scream against the fabric of time and space. The notion that art can overcome the boundaries of time and place, just like love is supposed to do.

€1400

Darth Vader dances, 2023, oil & spray paint on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

€700

Jamie’s Choice II, 2023, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

€625

I Have Become Spring, 2023, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€2425

Down the rabbithole: Im fremden, 2023, oil & spraycan on canvas, 121 x 121 cm

(sold)

It is still too far, 2023, oil & spray-can on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

When us kids would have to walk far we shouted at the front leader if it was still far to go, which sometimes elicited the answer: ‘not very far, little Smurf’, if it was still very far. This after the famous Smurfs, the french comics series from Peyo. If the goal was very near they would say: ‘Still far away, little Smurf’.

It became something I’d like to say when people asked how far something was. Not everyone understood the reference, and especially John Musgrave didn’t get it, when we were walking towards Het Amsterdamse Bos (a parc), with a microdot in our stomach (a powerful carrier for LSD). He just couldn’t see the fun of it.

So I commenced to make an abstract Father Smurf, the leader with the white bear and red clothes. It just didn’t work out as planned, so I had to let go of control, as usual.

This version holds the middle between a doodle and a fully realized psychedelic painting. There seems to be some kind of portal to another world, which referred to my early ‘Poort naar waar’ series, but also to the way Steve Ditko depicted dimensions in Doctor Strange.

€2425

The sky was the color of television, 2023, oil on canvas, 100 x 50 cm

I had this job in the middle of an industrial area. Every early morning I still had to walk about fifteen minutes from the bus-stop to get there.

After a long stretch of heavily cut grass, highway and advertisement columns, I finally reached the terrain. First thing I saw were these metal blocks of buildings with their brands in abrasive colors.

Always the rising sun cascaded in a different way on the corrugated monoliths. It felt like I was on another planet.

Some of the words I’ve used in the preceding parts I was confronted with for the first time while reading ‘Neuromancer’, by William Gibson.

Something like ‘corrugated’ puzzled me up until recently. I’m not in the habit of keeping the dictionary next to me while reading. I learn from context.

The title of the painting are the first words of ‘Neuromancer’. The alienated feel of the novel captures perfectly what I felt when walking towards my job.

€925

Scarlett Blues, 2023, oil & spray can on wood (pallet), 74 x 103,5 x 12,8 cm

I admit, I might have a slight Scarlett Johansson-problem. After all these years I still fall for unreachable women from television/movies/internet.

It’s a sickness, I know. Something no psychiatrist can help with. Those women always act, so you never know who they are. It’s the most superficial love of all. Just the outside and the made-up character.

I’ve seen interviews with her. She can talk as obnoxiously loud as any other American. I have the feeling she would be totally unappealing in real life. Probably shallow and vapid. Not my kind of girl.

But, still, have you seen her act, move, articulate, in her movies? She projects something that cannot be denied. Even after all these years since her heyday, when you would meet her likeness on every corner of the earth.

Did I capture her in this painting from an old photograph? Hardly, right? Do I have to? I’m not Rembrandt, you know. I’m a modern. I can be satisfied with projecting my silly obsession. Expressing myself. In this case on a pallet of rough spruce.

€1500

The promise of a new tomorrow, 2022, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

Sometimes a door is just a door, right? She went through it. After shooting me the most enticing smile I had ever seen.

I seem to remember it was the day I would part from San Diego. Abby said goodbye after a very short and very nice talk. She had to sleep. Me too, because of the airplane to New York.

But did she? Or was it an invitation? In my memory it’s becoming more and more that last one.

But painting the moment never worked for the canvas. I’ve got the photo’s to prove it. My memory wasn’t good enough for the moment and my skills weren’t good enough for the memory that I did have. So I erased her, apart from one little detail, right in the corner: a ghostly hand. A promise?

It’s strange how a title can imbue a painting with so much more meaning. It’s strange how it works when you’re mindless and lucky. Or mindlessly lucky.

(sold)

Fair enough, 2022, mixed media on cotton, 30 x 30 cm

€320

Charlize Down the Rabbit-hole (version 2), 2022, oil on canvas, 4 x (50 x 50 cm)

Do beautiful people know how lucky they are, that their perceived beauty attracts other beautiful people, but also changes the behavior of others?

It’s not Nietzsche’s Will to Power, but Beauty to Will. It creates a bubble that shields the beautiful from things that happen to normal people all the time.

The comedy-series 30 Rock had a hilarious episode with John Hamm as the beautiful person (season 3, episode 15). He was thick as a hammer. Couldn’t do anything right, but everyone complimented him nevertheless.

Do we understand that it’s just genetics of the skin, the bone structure, hair and eyes, but not necessarily health or intelligence? No, we don’t. That’s not how nature works. We’re dazzled by the outer beauty, thinking we’ve found the inner power, the fire of love

But what if you suddenly realize that all this good that keeps happening to you is just on account of your beauty? Will you fall deep and what is at the end of the tunnel?

€1725

The tallest man of the universe, 2021, oil on canvas, 65 x 55 cm

Growing up on De Noord, a street in Huizen-Bijvanck, the area grew with us. My sisters was born in my hometown Hilversum, but Huizen was her real place.

I distinctly remember the iron plates on the sand where there was later the asphalt of the streets. I remember fondly mom sliding with her bike in the pieces between the metal. I remember our first super market, the Torro. A large box mad out of corrugated metal.

That word, corrugated, I’d read so often in books by William Gibson, but up until quite recently I apparently never new what it meant.

De Noord was typical suburban ‘neubauten’. A freshly constructed city for the second wave of Dutch Babyboomers. The whole country was littered with it. We came there in 1975, moved house in early eighties and I left it screaming somewhere in 1991-2.

One of our famous residents was Rob Bruijntjes, the tallest man on earth. For real (221 cm). He sat on the backseat of his car to drive. The seat of his bike was extremely high. Best part was of course that if we accidentally shot our football on the roof of a garage, he could get it easily with his hand.

€925

The Bosbaan experience: John’s trip, 2021, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

The Amsterdamse Bos is not a forest. I should’ve said that to John. I should’ve told him that it was a park. A normal, regular Amsterdam park, albeit a bit bigger than average.

I should’ve told him before we took the acid. The LSD, in the shape of so-called microdots, when we were walking towards the park. I should’ve told him in the coffeeshop when I proposed to go to the Amsterdamse Bos, before we took the bus.

Maybe I was too stoned. Coffeeshop The Fatal Flowers was our favorite hang-out in those days. All kinds of cool cats came there,

Like John. John Musgrave, a South-African man who lived in a squat and sold stickers to get by. John who stole over-date bags of vegetables from behind the Appie (popular supermarket in the Netherlands.

John, who I hardly knew, with whom I went to this large park full of acid, in the middle of the cold wintry night, with only a bag of candy in my backpack.

It took us the whole night to get back to civilization, both for real and in our heads. After that everything was different.

€1025

Jamie’s choice I, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

€425

And the people began to think differently, 2022, oil on canvas, 55 x 35 cm

€775

The burning, 2021, oil on canvas, 80 x 130 cm

With my mother, her husband and younger sister on holidays in the north of Spain, near the town of Valladolid. I was finally able to loose my virginity somewhere near the Pyrenees on the French side of the border. Not yet 21, so that was a great relieve. Silly things you worry about when you’re young. It was with a Dutch girl, Wendy. We’d met her and her brother on the camping there.

On the camping in Valladolid we met two very funny and charismatic English boys and a kind of crazy German semi-hippie who had a lot of polm. Both my sister and I had the time of our life. I even drew a kid that couldn’t stay put. It was awful, I was so awfully stoned. I felt so bad. the girl I’d met there, Eluska, was of interest to the coolest of the two English. I was very much in love with her and she seemed to ‘love’ me too. It was the first time in my life this was two-sided.

She was Basque and looked like an exotic aristcrat with her pale skin, round face and jetblack hair. we kissed on the side of the pool. we walked hand in hand. I cupped a feel, but it never went further than second base. I was smitten and so terrified I’d loose her to those two British whom I severely admired.

When I was back home a month I got a letter from her. She had been just a bit more than infatuated with me, apparently, which I’d never guessed. Unfortunately it was just too far and I hadn’t the right disposition to just abandon everything. But you can say she was my first real love.

Creating the painting puts everything in a slightly different perspective. The heat of the country overwhelms everything, even her pale chaste skin, even my stubborn coarse Dutch ways. It’s the heat I’d felt in my head that is projected at the surroundings. Strangely enough this feels like a homage to Vincent van Gogh, though the emotions absolutely don’t correlate.

€2325

In your mind there is only peace, 2020.oil on canvas, 100 x 130 cm

€2525

She took her shoes off, 2020, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€2325

The thought of you undressing him, 2020, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

This song by Elvis Costello, ‘I Want You’, was what we the first time danced too. Close, body to body. I immediately fell heavily in love, but it became worse after we went to my room and I tore up her panties. But she didn’t want to continue. she had a friend, I know. I knew that from the beginning, that she had a friend.

I’ve always hated Costello’s voice. It’s too squeaky for my taste. Which is a shame, because I get that he’s a great songwriter. ‘I want You’, on the other hand…

Another ‘I Want You I really like, though I dislike the singer’s voice too, is the one by Bob Dylan. Now I’m looking there appears to be an ‘I Want You’ by Paris Hilton and one by Traci Lords (yep, her). Everyone wants somebody.

I repainted it several times. Never came real satisfaction. This seems to be the final version.

€2325

Girl with the glitter crocs, 2020, oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm

€2325

Jo (Grenfell), 2021, oil & charcoal on canvas, 116 x 121 cm

Feeling like suffocating from the previous direction, the almost monochomatic paintings from Witness, I really needed something else. But I couldn’t just abandon the gravity of those works in one swoop. It needed a culmination, something that would show what I’d learned, something that would crown my achievements, but would integrate works from earlier incarnations.

I found a photo of all kinds of dignitaries watching the horrible fire at the Grenfell Tower, London, in which 72 people died. Prime-minister Theresa May stood in front. Every faces had its significant emotion.

Apart from the fire of the building, it also seemed like the EU was burning, with the upcoming Brexit as dark highlight. I thought Grenfell could function as a metaphor for the larger problems concerning our lives: the inability to govern and conduct a civilized society. That’s why some of the people in the painting have names not directly connected to the disaster.

The title ‘Jo’ derives from the murdered English politician Jo Cox, She was in the House of Commons for Labout and against Brexit. She got killed before the referendum by a right-wing nutter.

€2050

Grenfell (sketch 7 + 8), 2017, oil, on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

€525

Life on hold, 2018, oil on canvas, 101 x 111 cm

€3025

What a dismal joke!, 2017, oil on canvas, 71 x 56 cm

€1500

The state of the world, 2017, oil on canvas,81 x 51 cm

Not for sale

Some of the mothers have grandmothers, 2017, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

€560

Every moment in time and space is burning, 2017, 66 x 56 cm

(sold)

99-Year lease, 2016, oil on canvas, 116 x 81 cm

€2400

Friday of anger, 2015, oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm

€2425

The fair must be, 2015, oil on canvas, 131 x 136 cm

€4050

Section Z, 2014, oil on canvas, 116 x 101 cm

‘Soccer is war’ is a quote attributed to Rinus Michels, the famous coach of Ajax in the seventies. Just how literal that sometimes can be was proven in 1985 in the Heizelstadion in Brussels.

Fans of the Italian soccer-team Juventus and English Liverpool met for the finale of the Europacup 1. They had a severe altercation in which 39 people were killed and about 400 wounded.

The arena was divided in Italian and English sections. Section Z was a large neutral part in which Belgian supporters could stay. In reality most of the tickets were bought by Belgian-Italian supporters.

Before the championship started there was a friendly match by young Belgian soccer-players, who accidentally were dressed in the colors of Juventus and Liverpool. The painting depicts this game. It had to be stopped because of small riots.

€2425

Directive 8682, 2014, oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm

After many years letting civilians massacre the Christian Armenians who lived in Turkish territory, the Turkish government decided in 1915, under pretense of the war with Russia, to mass-deport and kill the up to two million Armenians, of which at least one million didn’t survive.

The government was aided by fugitive Chechens and Circassians, as well by the Kurdish tribes living in the Armenian area.

Many of the surviving women and children and the ten to fifteen percent of Armenians that were allowed to live in their towns were forced to convert to the Islam.

The Nazi’s were inspired by the Ottoman Turks to do their genocide different.

Directive 8682 refers to the order given by the Ottoman leader to take away the arms of the Armenian soldiers who fought in the Russo-Ottoman War. They were put in free-labor units and massacred.

One famous (half)Armenian is Kim Kardashian, who’s grandparents migrated from the Russian Empire. Another famous Armenian is tennis-player Andre Agassi. His grandfather came from Kiev in the Russian Empire. Somewhere along the road the name ‘Aghassian’ was changed to Agassi to avoid Ottoman persecution.

€2450

A brighter tomorrow, 2013, oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm

These figures in reddish brown seem to be dressed in garbage-sacks. Both have square machines on their belly. behind them we see some kind of abandoned farm apparatus. The horizon is full of dark, menacing clouds.

It’s 1986 in the Soviet-Union and one of the reactors of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. An area of thirty kilometers was abandoned to safeguard the people there.

This so-called Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), which covers 2,800 square km of northern Ukraine, now represents the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe and has become an iconic experiment in rewilding.

€2250

The day of wisdom, 2013, oil on canvas, 91 x 111 cm

In september 1939, Der Tag der Weisheit, German scientists met at a conference in Peenemünde to discuss the progress of the rocket-project that they had been working on since 1930.

Many of the engineers and scientists who worked at the V1 and V2 (both rockets that Nazi-Germany used to exact vengeance on Britain for bombing German cities) were later hired to work for the American rocket-program. One of them, Werner von Braun, was instrumental in getting the first man on the moon.

In the novel Gravity’s Rainbow the recluse writer Thomas Pynchon uses the trajectory of a rocket as metaphor for the live of his protagonist, Slothrop (besides that for many other, obscure, reasons).

€2975

A few tempers got frayed, 2012, oil on canvas, 101 x 81 cm

1969 wasn’t a great year for the emerging counter-culture in general. After the increasingly violent and world-wide student protests of 1968 and the severe protests in that same year during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the peace-loving hippies got another smack in the head during the Rolling Stones-concert in Altamont, near Livermore, California, when a Hell’s Angel-bodyguard killed a member of the audience.

In general this concert is seen as when the Sixties lost its innocence, which you can read as a generation (Boomers) losing its innocence. The inauguration of bourgeois Nixon and the concurrent aggravation of the Vietnam War didn’t help much to soothe the blow.

In his usual laconic way Lead-guitarist of The Stones, Keith Richards, mentioned when asked about the concert that ‘a few tempers got frayed’.

€2250

Half-mast, 2012, oil on canvas, 56 x 71 cm

So, I had a theme to work with: historical moments, adjacent photo’s. Already there was a kind of style: two or three colors, not more,

It had to be as direct as possible, not eternally re-painting. I wanted freshness, directness, polishing off the dust of history.

Color always has been a strong staple of Dutch painting, especially in modernism. You could not mistake a Van Gogh, Mondrian or Karel Appel for painters from another country.

It was as if they were rebelling against the typical stuffy museum colors of a Rembrandt, Breitner or Mauve. And in a lot of ways they were. They arrived on the scene together with the first progressives in the Netherlands. They were dreaming of a new, pristine, advanced future.

Bright, lively, fresh-painted colors could stand as a metaphor of that future. The New World would shine as a beacon of prosperity and humanity.

This painting is the worked out version of the previous ‘Apeldoorn’, about the Queens-day assassination attempt on our royal family.

€1100

I do not care what form of state, 2012, oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm

An idea was born. I could use photo’s as starting point for my paintings, to talk about one of my favorite subjects: history. At least the part of history that is photographed. This way history starts in the 1920’s.

The real challenge was to find photo’s that in and of itself wouldn’t directly report the historical incident. I knew immediately I’d prefer lateral material. Photo’s that would indicate rather than point at or explain.

This painting is based on the arrest of one of the suspects of the killing of archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, the assassination that sparked World War I (then know as The Great War).

You can see the suspect on the right, held by two officers. In the middle we see two persons in traditional Turkish dress (Bosnian?) held back by another officer. All the way to the left with the cowboy-hat someone who I suspect to be an agent in civil clothes of maybe a secret service man.

Unfortunate for all connected here it was the wrong suspect, not Gavrilo Princip, the real assassin.

The title of the painting was taken from a statement by Princip at his trial: ‘I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.’

€2325

No debates, no protests, no processions, no petitions, 2012, oil on canvas, 66 x 86 cm

On November 2nd 2004 I arrived around 10 o’clock at work, in De Rode Hoed, a small theater in the center of Amsterdam. We had to build a stage for some program in the afternoon.

It used to be a secret church from the time that Catholicism was banned in Amsterdam, several strains of Protestantism being the official religion. There were more places like this. Nowadays it’s a cultural center, mostly famous for the talk-shows Sonja and Het Lagerhuis.

When I got in that tuesday-morning the first thing somebody said: ‘Have you heard that Theo van Gogh is killed?’ I replied deadpan with: ‘I didn’t know he could be awake this early.’

Surely I was projecting, because I’ve always hated waking up so early and couldn’t imagine anyone famous as Van Gogh voluntarily getting out of bed this early.

Being flippant avoided the connection with the reality of the murdered tv-host and film-maker, someone I’d casually met not even that long before in same Rode Hoed.

They’d needed more participants for a pro- or anti-smoking show (I can’t remember exactly, it was a commercial job for him). I got in the anti-smoker panel, but was seduced by Van Gogh’s rhetoric to choose the smoker-side. Fortunately, because in those days I stil smoked. He even gave me a cigarette of his, Gauloises without filter.

The title of the painting is taken directly from the manifesto that the killer Mohammed Bouyeri pinned in Van Gogh’s chest with a knife. It was addressed to the apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with whom Van Gogh had made the short movie ‘Submission part1‘.

His killing was not very far away from my home. When I finished work I went there quickly, but it was mostly people feeling desperate and angry.

€900

When the dead keep hearing the music (sketch), 2011, oil on canvas mounted on mdf-panel, 80 x 60 cm

To make a new painting preparation is required. It’s not like with computers that you can arrange color fields and lines indefinitely without muddying the canvas.

After a while you loose the clarity and freshness of the work and it’s for a large amount the appeal of a lot of paintings that they look as if conjured up out of nothing. Other paintings give the feeling of eternal elaboration, like the works of Eugène Leroy.

I’ve used a photo of the audience at the notorious Altamont concert by The Rolling Stones in 1969. The end to an era, they’ve said.

€900

Apeldoorn (sketch), 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm

On 30th of April 2009 there was an assassination attempt on the king and his family. The Dutch were celebrating the by now famous Queensday, the birthday of Queen Beatrix.

A man in a black Suzuki Swift tried to crash into the bus of the royal family. While attempting he killed eight innocent bystanders and injured ten others.

It felt like a paradigm shift from the previous age to a new, uncertain one. Queensday was, even if you had nothing to do with the royal family, a fun innocent frivolous day of drinking and partying to live-music, while the royals traveled from one silly entertainment to another, like toilet-throwing.

The image is taken from a still. Not sure what the origins are. There were mobile phones with camera’s, but it wasn’t a widespread disease like nowadays.

Slowly an idea for a theme was developing. Something about photo’s and history, something about painting and audience.

€350

Whatever happened to Kennedy’s liver, 2011, oil on canvas, 50 x 80 cm

I like the honest, unrefined view of paint (or words, or pencil line, or ink). I don’t like the common way of deceiving the eye: pretending a material isn’t the material but something different, like wood, or metal, or skin. I can appreciate it in others, but have not much use for it in my own work.

What I do love is searching for the smudge: where honest materials suggest something else than there actually is. When you see a blue as purple or when a line is actually residue of two planes not really closing. I like when something is a smudge of paint and at the same time a face. I enjoy searching for the tension between the pure material state of paint and something that suggests our animal reality. I enjoy it when someone says that the real painting looks different from the digital photo.

I do so like searching for that unattainable in-between in the material, but I also like that in the subject-matter. Starting point for this painting was a photo of the crowd that Kennedy’s car passed right before he was shot. One member of the audience attracted my attention. He seemed to posses a quintessential quality of innocence and casualness.

The title is a homage to the famous Arshile Gorky painting The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944).

In the end the juxtaposition between the way it’s painted and the subject-matter makes for so many more associations than I had ever considered upfront.

€585