Inspiration

Where words seem lines, lines become words

When I draw and paint, I don't think about drawing or painting. Just as a carpenter does not think about the hammer when he is working, but about the object that grows under his hands; so I don´t think about brush, pen or pencil. They are me, connecting me to what I make, to what is becoming from imagination image. So holding on and tenaciously learning to let go ,while I am busy in my dream world. I paint and draw with heart and soul.

The translation. I often start with monochrome colours and work from there with more and different colours. Colours present themselves, shapes take on meaning, I surprise myself. The story tells itself, lines become words. Dutch poet Slauerhoff could only live in his poems. I don't roam, I have my home, but that lives in and through my work. Drawing is meaning. Colour and shape shape and colour my home and my life.

What just seems to present itself has sources. All kinds of inspiration connect in my work.

From Monet's Nymphéas that I admire endlessly. They recur in my water nymphs, emerging from the blue, gasping for air, kissing the sky.

Dancing through life with Matisse, three colours for a big dance panel: the azure sky, the pink of the bodies, the green of the hill".

Cy Twombly's apparent chaos, a choreography of lines, graffiti almost, from which meaning rises. Smoke signals from a burning canvas.

Claire Basler's castle between Vichy and Montluçon, in the heart of France, is one big work of art. You might as well find it in an art magazine as in a glossy about unusual home interiors. Château Beauvoir, it could not have another name. Paintings, murals, objects: colours and motifs jump out at you everywhere. You walk around like a child in a sweet shop. And flowers, flowers everywhere. Even in the garden..

In few words a sad life, that of Charlotte Salomon, Berlin 1917 - Auschwitz 1943. That alone says so much. But not everything, of course. In the south of France, in just a few years, from 1939 until her arrest, she created an incredible body of work. Her own life in hundreds of gouaches, now kept at the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. Leben? Oder Theater? she called it. Some eight hundred pages of colour and lust for life, against the grain. To look at and think about.

These are big names whose work amazes me, inspires me, makes me reflect and takes me away. Beautiful or not beautiful,  that is not the goal, the final destination or the aspiration.

Emotion.
Recognition.
Turmoil

I am so interested: what do you see?