I am an artist who concentrates on two dimensional work in the art of painting and drawing, something I have been doing since I was a small child. My work has been developing in all kind of ways over the years. From 1996-2000 I studied Fine Arts at Academie voor Kunst en Industrie (AKI / ArtEZ, Enschede in the Netherlands). During those years I made mainly abstract oil paintings. The work was a study of contrasts, color, technique and scale. After graduating in 2000 I moved back to Amsterdam where the oil paintings I made became more figurative as I used photography as a starting point. In 2006 I moved to Sweden to live with my wife and her children. I learned Swedish and became a father myself. After adapting to the new situation I continued painting and found occasions to exhibit my work. At first I started painting with oil paint but it was time for something different.
Having done quite some fishing as a hobby I became intrigued by the fact that the anglers in Öresund use land worms as bait. In the Netherlands anglers have to use worms from the sea because land worms would melt away in the salty water in the North-sea. I started searching information about worms from the sea and found out there are many different types. I also discovered that a lot of the images of worms in books and on the internet were hand drawn. I learned a bit more about the history of biology and about Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his classification scheme resulting in the “Systema Naturae”. The art of drawing used as scientific illustrations at the time before photography, was of great importance.
Inspired by this, I switched from painting to drawing which resulted in work with much more attention for detailing. While I was making shadows by dotting a gradient from light to dark I used a fine-liner and realized that this technique could also work for silk screen. I contacted my friend and colleague Michiel Schuurman who taught me how to screenprint at a place called Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier (AGA). After drawing color separated black&white drawings, I made big full color silk screens.
Recently I read about the early microbiologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) who collected small organisms from the ditch and studied them in an aquarium. I became curious about how his working room might have looked like at the time. So based on what I could find out about him and his time, I made my own version of it in a drawing. This seems to be the beginning of a new series of works concentrating on historical rooms.