Most people are looking for something in a photo.
A representation of life.
For me it is immaterial.
I want to be touched.
I wanted to capture nothingness,
but I couldn’t.
There is always something.
So I chose something doing nothing.
The smallest detail fascinates me.
It culminates in a full picture. I love what the Germans call Bildung.
Layer over layer, it all adds up.
Seeing means thinking.
At least, when I see, I think.
The image comes out in words,
the language of my thoughts.
And so the image alone is made up of a language.
When I look I see nothing.
Just looking without a language. It is fleeting.
My thoughts have structure.
I love structure.
My ideas are intuitive.They come and go
and my precious structure runs riot.
To be honnest I just do and it seems like fun.
The grid gives order.
It is the language of repetition.
For me repetition should be infinitive.
But no copies.
Repetition of images that could have been copies.
A lot of what we do is daily chore.
the monochrome dullness of daily life.
It is always the same but with a twits. I relish the twist.
I eat bread daily, but I never see it.
One small loaf has eighteen slices.
They are all unique.
Eighteen portraits of bread.
If you look closely you will see a pattern in the bread.
It looks like lace.
In the Black Paradise the trees and bushes
could almost be a Moorish pattern design.
It is practically wallpaper.
But luckily there is a small fence, a perfect way out.
There must be a hundred ways to take a picture.
Technique plays a fundamental role.
Every picture is coloured by its technique.
Even no technique has impact.
My earlies photos where black and white.
Then I discovered the old thechniques.
My photos turned brown.
The move to colour was a relief.
The yellow tree is very fleetingly yellow.
Only a week or two.
An intensive time.
Time changes light.
Light changes colour.
Sky blue becomes white
and all the shades in between.
I control the final colours.
Vincent Van Gogh said: “a painter had better start from the colours on his palette
than from the colours in nature”.
I only wanted colour
The green of grass and the red of meat.
Nothing more, because that was enough.
The label Romanticism pops up now and then.
I think the Dutch sociologist Willem Schinkel
Has it right when he says:
“the world is changing too fast to keep
using the same old words to describe it”.