Paintings I

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

€1375

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.

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

€1400

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.

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

€2425

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.

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

€2325

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.

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

€4050

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

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. All other faces had their own significant emotions.

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 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.