First Post

Dear readers,
 
I should be upfront from the onset and admit to being quite nervous using the online platform to write about the ideas and experiences that are the landscape of my work, these are intense and personal, but also big ideas that are difficult to talk about without becoming polemical.  
 
Being apprehensive about cyber-space has something to do with its remoteness on one hand and its ubiquity on the other, talking to no one in particular and everyone in the notional, Of course this is in addition to the general apprehension of attempting to conceptualize my work which operates on another dimension altogether and that I feel should communicate independently of any explanations.
 
 The pieces that are on this website stretch from a period between 1999 and the present, they all emerge from one place and one idea that has developed and is continuously developing, it is a source of continuous emergence and re-iteration of particular patterns and realities. The experience and notion of the spiritual and transcendental is at the heart of it. I will ultimately try to delve into that dimension, at times through poetry, contemplative and esoteric writing, and other times as part of a conversation with you my readers. I hope that this becomes a generative resource for anyone and everyone who ends up here and who is interested in these things.
 
In 1998-1999 I was an art student in The Hague. I was painting but it wasn’t clear to me what ideas drove me- I was always interested in spaces, and these in many paintings emerged from the process, but sometimes referencing photographs, drawings or imaginings.
 
What started happening to my painting at that time was very strange to me as it was sudden, new and very intensively Other. I seemed to be going into types of trances, in which some presence other than me was a partner to the painting, this was some form of deep, unconscious communication and was very exciting to me, as my interest in the spiritual, and questions about the nature of reality have occupied and fascinated me for as long as I can remember. This was a bewildering gateway opening in front of me, it embodied a reality that hadn’t resonated with me before. I had been born and lived in cities all my life and I loved them, even the brutal looking aspects of it. But now in complete contrast Nature was emerging from these paintings in full force, and it wasn’t echoing purely material aspects of it, it was full of spirits and entities, it was nothing short of magical.
My visual language has always oscillated between degrees of figuration and abstraction, but essentially it is process-led abstraction that is at the heart of it, the images are “excavated” from the so- called depths of the canvas, the pictorial space slowly takes shape until the image as a whole becomes to my eyes and mind a semblance that is coherent and resonates with my inner vision and sense of harmony and narrative. It is an intangible and nebulous presence prior to its formation, and moreover is like a living thing that keeps on changing and moving almost regardless of my own intention...