Van Gogh I Painting

I am a visual artist living and working in Amsterdam. I make large scaled drawings, with charcoal, chalk, pastel and sometimes tempera. Mostly in black and white but recently with more colour. At the moment I am inspired by Pictorialism (early photography) and the Pre-Raphaelites. My work is related to concepts of aesthetics, romanticism, history, vanity and nostalgia. About my recent work: By painting and drawing I make a journey through time, to the past and back again. On paper I combine drawing and painting techniques to create larger than life figures in scenic surroundings. Here are images from the past, such as Impressionist paintings and historical photographs the inspiration. Such historical images fascinate me, they reveal a historical reality and presence that is simultaneously hidden and locked due to the passing of time, just like the future is. Time has made them into containers for the imagination and feelings of nostalgia and longing, melancholy and pride, transience and vanity. My work is an immersion in such a magical twilight zone in which fiction and non-fiction meet, a strange dream world in-between the real and the imaginary.