A selection of my paintings is now on show at McGee's gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

TooHoT is about to hit the shelves! My award winning entry for the PAL design contest will be appearing in stores around the globe soon. We have made them in the 3 primary colors; yellow, red and blue, don't they look awesome?

Next year the PAL design contest has a Finnish edition endorsed by their national design organization. I'm not sure if it's open for international entries since I can't understand a word of the flyer. Feel free to drop them an email if you are interested in entering.

The first few layers of a new work.
After our trip to South Africa last spring, I was inspired to create a painting of a landscape covered in snow. It took me until winter arrived in New Zealand to come up with the right idea. The final bit of inspiration came from a Camellia I recently spotted on my walk into town. The freshly fallen flowers will return in this painting but with a twist....

To show some of the things I do when I am not painting, I have added a photo album to my site. I hope you enjoy the pictures of inspirational landscapes, weird things and places, outdoor activities etc.
And for those who can read Dutch, you can check out my personal blog at the Volkskrant site.

A graphic design I created for iGoogle, the customizable Google interface, has recently been released for download. It's actually 3 in one because the atmosphere of the theme changes during the day.

Converting my paintings to this layout was quite a challenge but it turned out pretty good. Now the theme is up and running, I'll update it regularly with new work. Feel free to use it and don't forget to leave some feedback ;-)

Public Art is one of Asia's leading art magazines and is published in South Korea. Their May issue had a special feature about surrealism. I was surprised to find my name and one of my works mentioned in an article about magic realism. I don't quite understand what's being written but I'm sure it must be positive!

One of the best things I recently bought is this new easel. Well.... it's not really an easel and it's not new either.
In the last couple of weeks my old easel slowly but surely started falling apart. It's one of those fancy wooden artists easels but I have never been quite happy with it. While looking for a new one I realized that the commonly sold studio easels don't really fit my working method. My style of painting requires me to work very close to the canvas and I move my work around a lot. Amazingly traditional easels don't really allow for that, adjustments are pretty coarse. And even the most expensive models are quite inadequate from an ergonomics perspective.
A second hand drawing board proved to be the best solution for me. They are cheap because most architects/engineers have switched to computer aided design. And functionality and ergonomics are really much better.

Last weeks I made some big steps forwards since I started this painting. I think the direction where this work is going is becoming pretty obvious now ;-) In the next layer I'm going to refine the colors and add some more trees in the distance. An Araucaria or Norfolk Pine is a very stately evergreen which is commonly found near coastal areas. As a side note: it is also the national tree of Chile.

People often ask me about my inspiration. To be quite honest, the conceptual stage of my art is often more elimination than inspiration. The initial idea usually appears when my mind is sort of idling, like when I'm traveling or taking a shower. From there it's is primarily a matter of bringing the idea back to the essential. This means I'm usually throwing away 90%.

In general my work is much closer to reality than meets the eye. Most of my ideas come from ordinary things around me; landscapes, seeds, flowers, buildings and I take lots of reference photos. The images below illustrate the relationship between the initial concept and the finished painting. The first image shows a Pinus Radiata plantation close to were I live. You can see the influences in both Populus flucta and Sequoiadendron nemus . The second one shows some berries of a Flax Lily I found while walking the dog. Most of the fruit fell off when I walked home, but enough was left for a sketchy picture. The last image illustrates the optical characteristics of solid crystal. Just click on the images to see the resulting art works.

Time is a very important factor in the creation of my work. I use slow drying oil paints so I have to work on 3-4 paintings simultaneously. Each painting requires a specific buildup. This means I work with a rotation schedule and some paintings might take months from start to finish. Apart from the technical aspects, the drying also forces me to stand back and reflect on a painting in progress. After working in close contact on a canvas for a while, it's always refreshing to see it in another light and from a distance.