"Rapids" Painting

Born and raised in the Netherlands, but for the last 25 years residing and painting in New Zealand.

My painting-based research investigates the dynamic tension between chance and intentionality. I examine how unpredictable external inputs shape the creation of abstract paintings, allowing forces beyond my direct control to participate in their formation. While this methodology offers freedom, it also introduces vulnerability. By inviting uncertainty, I aim to disrupt habitual patterns, learned behaviours, and established ways of knowing. I do this through semi-controlled experiments that rely on variables other than the artist’s brush or expressive gesture.

My approach stems from a desire for detachment—a distancing of the self that shifts attention toward natural transitional processes rather than the artist’s impulse to impose form. By limiting my own control, I create conditions for play, curiosity, and discovery. This helps to suspend formal intention, subjective will, and the desire for overt expression. Embracing transience, the work echoes organic cycles of growth and decay, acknowledging impermanence as a generative force.

I treat painting as a self-referential medium. Paint is often applied as evenly as possible, minimizing visible gesture or brushwork in order to reduce subjective mark-making. Instead, I adopt systematic or rule-based manipulations of the material. By attenuating artistic agency, the work opens itself to randomness, dispersal, and material autonomy. At the same time, this process gestures toward the emergence of a universal symbolic or ideographic grammar inherent within painting itself.

These works become sites that hold traces of experience, bearing evidence of past autonomous material events. I sometimes think of them as data visualisations: they communicate information derived from processes that are abstract or not immediately perceptible. Rather than representing something external, the paintings present the event itself—a document of dialogue that invites viewers to draw new connections through their own encounter with the work.