According to Plato, beauty plays a role in the desire for a higher world. I recognize that. In my work, I always hope to capture something of the invisible and unspeakable. Impermanence and nostalgia, the realization that everything is ultimately not whole or held together, play an essential role in my experience and work. The slight melancholy shines through. To quote Lieke Marsman, “We raise our voices to drown out the senseless. Perhaps I do that by painting….

When I begin new work, slowly but surely something forms under my hands that shows me the way. Sometimes appealing to reason, other times to emotion. At each stage I am in constant dialogue with what is on the canvas – each square centimeter gradually finds its place within the greater whole.

Over the years, my work has constantly evolved. For a long time the focus was on coping with human suffering: the art of coping. I painted from my experience as a mental health therapist, where for years I was confronted with many forms of suffering and injustice, as well as from some personal, deeply felt losses, and the mourning that followed. This experience changed when my work as a therapist stopped and I walked the Camino to Santiago. A reversal followed; I experienced an inner urge to paint organic forms, inspired by nature, with more use of color and material. I was also inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who in her book Braiding Sweetgrass elaborates on the coexistence between humans and nature based on mutual giving, rather than unilateral taking, economic gain, and control, and by the writer and mystic Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who says that nature is a living mystery and how silence, simplicity, and attention can open us up to the deep mystery that is in all living things and show us the way to the transcendent.

In my current paintings, I want to express and celebrate my wonder and gratitude for the grandeur and inexhaustible richness of nature, while at the same time penetrating something of its mystery. I call it poetic reflections of nature. I do this through more or less abstract forms that can be interpreted in multiple ways, using a variety of materials and techniques. My work is also diverse in terms of format. I limit myself to vegetation and what is directly related to it.

I hope to take an occasional viewer into wonder, into transcendence and into deeper layers of reciprocity.