According to Plato, beauty plays a role in the longing for a higher world. I can relate to that.
In my work, I always hope to capture something of the invisible and the inexpressible.
Transience and nostalgia, the realization that ultimately nothing can be kept whole or held together, and the search for meaning and purpose in life and suffering play an essential role in my experience and seep into my work. The gentle melancholy—which is characteristic of me—shines through. To quote Lieke Marsman: “We raise our voices to shout down the senseless.” Perhaps that is exactly what I do through painting…

When I begin a new piece, something slowly but surely takes shape beneath my hands that, though sometimes with difficulty, shows me the way. Sometimes it appeals to reason, other times to emotion. At every stage, I engage in a constant dialogue with what is on the canvas—every square centimeter finds its place, step by step, within the larger whole.

Over the years, my work has continually evolved. For a long time, dealing with human suffering was central: the art of coping. I painted from my experience as a therapist in mental health care, where for years I was confronted with many forms of suffering and injustice, as well as from some personal, deeply felt losses and the grief that followed.
This experience changed when my work as a therapist came to an end and I walked the Camino to Santiago. A shift followed; I felt an inner urge to paint organic forms, inspired by nature, with greater use of color and material.
Nature serves as a metaphor for transience, the passage of time, beauty in many forms, reciprocity, destruction, decay, and the new life that emerges from it. Each work can be created and interpreted from a different perspective—or even multiple perspectives—or multiple works can be viewed from the same perspective.
The writer and mystic Thomas Merton (1915–1968) points out that nature is a living mystery—how true that is—and how silence, simplicity, and mindfulness can open us up to that deep mystery present in all living things and show us the way to the transcendent.
I incorporate these aspects into my imagination on canvas. Above all, it is an attempt to reach for something of “the Great Beyond” (Leonard Cohen)—that which lies beyond words and images, where my not-knowing plays the leading role and where, if I am very lucky, I can sometimes, for a brief moment—fleetingly and always inadequately—touch upon it. That unfulfilled longing and not-knowing constantly drive me forward in a search that has proven persistent.

I’ve given my current body of work the overarching title “poetic reflections on nature” and seek to depict it through more or less abstract forms open to multiple interpretations, using a variety of materials and techniques. My work is also diverse in terms of format.

I hope to draw an occasional viewer into a sense of wonder, into transcendence and toward deeper levels of reciprocity.