Machiavelli in China IV Print

“Nothing we use or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses” (Hannah Arendt) Therefore, I use not words, but images. I am a storytelling artist, I was told, and I agree utterly with that. But I do not want to tell a story. I want to hint at a story. Combine fragments of stories into a strong image that can maybe spur the viewer to make a new one, or at least question, maybe even augment the one (s)he has in his or her head. Maybe that, which I want to show about humans and their stories, is ambiguous. I know that our identity, be that individual, local, national or global, is a story. Yet. I believe that story. I need it myself too. We all need to be a story. Yet. It is just a story. An amalgam of choices, connections, way of presenting that cannot be defined as ‘the truth’ but isn’t a lie either. Something that is all together not present in the world, in the way that it is something you cannot touch, yet at the same time it is very present as is steers our actions and thoughts. Those of you and me as well as industry and nation leaders. We are a storytelling species. We naturally try to connect everything we see, everything around us, into a storyline. It is by connecting things into stories that we make our greatest discoveries, and make our gravest mistakes. Whenever I am painting or drawing I am saying: “Now try to make a story out of this!” I am ever on the search to make my images stronger. I am a Dutch artist, travelling the world with my wife. Have been livng and working in the Netherlands, in China and now in Switserland. Moving from order to chaos and back again. Artists I look up to and am inspired by are; Cy Twombly, Basquiat, Daniel Richter, Adrian Ghenie, Francis Bacon.