Information about my work

Galerie 1: baby's
These are drawing of very young baby's. What fascinates me in them, are the ever changing facial expressions, the way they move their hands and body. In the beginning baby's ‘are’ their body. Most things are done with the whole body, no restrictions. Their behaviour is not yet polished or socially adapted.
What could be the meaning of those facial expressions and behaviour? Is it a mirror of the soul, an exercise in using facial muscles, a change of emotions, an early personality charateristic, ...?
I made the drawings larger than a grown-up person. This disappears totally in reproduction.

Galerie 3: imagination
Work in different technics and sizes. It is based on imagination, not reality. It requires some imagination of the spectator.

Galerie 4: Tree-spirits; nature
- Amelisweerd. Most of these photo's and drawings are made in the wood of Amelisweerd, along the A27. These trees will disappear when the a27-highway is enlarged.
I tried to show each tree individually. A tree is not just a tree. When you stand under it and look up, the tree looks very different than when you stand in front of it. Each step aside alters that view again. One tree has many different faces. A bare tree in winter shows this very well.
So each tree is an individual. But also, as a whole, they refer to other places where trees are cut down for similar reasons.
Trees stimulate imagination. Imagination that values things differently.

Tree-spirits
If trees are animate, they are necessarily sensitive and the cutting of them down becomes a delicate surgical operation, which must be performed with as tender a regard as possible for the feelings of the sufferers, who otherwise may turn and rend the careless or bungling operator. When an oak is being felled “it gives a kind of shriekes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting. The Ojebways “very seldom cut down green or living trees, from the idea that it puts them to pain, and some of their medicine-men profess to have heard the wailing of the trees under the axe.” Trees that bleed and utter cries of pain or indignation when they are hacked or burned occur very often in Chinese books...
Uit: J G Frazer, The Golden Bough. A study in magic and religion. Uit H9, §1 Tree-spirits