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House of now, 2023-24
My work often originates on location—in public spaces, remote cottages, urban environments, the countryside, or while traveling.
I consider my creative process as a visual diary in which I engage in dialogue with my close surroundings.
I use drawing as a playful method to keep looking at the world as if I were discovering it for the first time. Closely observing-storing fragments or snippets of places and objects to playfully discover and rediscover pieces of my ever-changing daily surroundings.
Sometimes, the familiar slips through your fingers, not because it’s elusive, but because you’ve lived with it for so long that it becomes invisible. Ordinary things—like a rhythm of a street corner at dusk or the way light filters on an object—blend into the background, waiting to be noticed. To really see them, I have to step back, like a traveler in my own life, forcing myself to see the world as if I’ve just arrived.
As I actively observe, and start to look closer at the bottle of water in front of me, it starts to feel increasingly more vibrant and intense.
Through the layer of the otherwise ordinary brown café table, a deep red hue emerges, accompanied by green and purplish shadows I hadn’t noticed before.
The once-transparent bottle begins to reflect these vibrant colors - like snow melting in spring and things underneath it are gradually revealed.
Movement and color can't hold shape anymore and beneath the world seen at first glance, another begins to reveal itself
During the drawing process, an in-between world emerges—one that doesn’t fully distort the reality I once perceived, but rather exists alongside it: a blend of my subjective perceptions in dialogue with the conceptual frameworks and traditional values I encountered earlier.
Merleau-Ponty,
The world of perception
Amsterdam, Netherlands 2024
Close-up
entering through our eyes,
the world arrives in the distance
mere shadows flitting across a blurred background
seeing things you might have seen before
a bottle of water, a person standing in the door
opening a window, a house
I feel i know them by heart.
but somehow I cannot make sense of it
until it descends
into my close environment
and transforms into an experience.
In favor of criticism
Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person-you are always a different person -as are all your present "truths." being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm-something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. -This is said in favor of criticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 307, The Gay Science.
why do we perceive things that are actually not there?
Or why are we not seeing things that are there?
Time flows, even if it seems like it doesn't change
The drawings of the tree trunks (on the left and at the top of this page) are still in progress. I started by sketching the trunk of a tree in Frankendael Park (Amsterdam) and plan to return daily to observe and document how the tree’s colors, forms, and overall appearance shift with the changing times of day, weather conditions, and light angles, as well as my own psychological and emotional state on that particular day.