why is my work important to me

Why is my work important to me?

At the beginning, when I started to create, my focus was on the material, initially lead, tar, wood, resin and then paint. Being able to be tactile and experiment with the medium, not worrying what the outcome would be, completely fulfilled me. My life before that was a bit like in Magelan’s sentence: “you have to leave your coast to find a new country”. I am the circus acrobat who has to let loose and be in that uncertainty, that moment of fall and not knowing how to continue, before you grab on to something new. Always leaving, always searching.

Being in the studio with my work grounded me and that made my work unexpectedly important to me. It was like arriving somewhere and not worrying about having to leave again. Being in the studio inhabiting and feeling the space, connecting to your paint and brushes and tools, but most importantly connecting to the work, understanding what is happening, enjoying the challenge and the struggle, has become that integral element.

My art helps me heal. Revolving about my thoughts just getting lost, going back and forth between thought and acting, doing, focussing only on the process for hours, on the paint, the color, the form, the concept, the composition, then stepping back, then going deeper in my thoughts. My work, and maybe because I was not looking for this, has somehow opened drawers from my childhood, that I had pushed myself to forget and suppress. It taught me to work through things. To not go away, to work for weeks and weeks on a painting until I think it is solved. My work now allows me to talk about themes that over the past couple of years have become important to me. I guess, those themes where always important, but only through working with art I was able to work through my memory and to find a way to express my feelings, to find a voice to say things without saying them.