Registration Netherlands Institute for Art History RKD 473520

Autodidact painter and grafic artist, fiction writer
Graduated at University of Amsterdam
Digital vector painter. Started around 1998 with watercolor, linocut and etching ground on glass. Changed to digital painting in 2004, initially raster. Proceeded through a combination of raster-vector to vector around 2014. Lorenzo Award for digital painting at the 2015 Florence Biennale, several other awards. Author of Digital painting explained and illustrated, 2013-2019 an online survey for artists and collectors.

I am exploring the new medium of vector. My work develops in cycles from figurative to abstract and back to figurative. Hard lines, monochrome colors and perfect gradients limit the emotional palette of vector. Ceci est un oeuf 2015 expresses my initial dislike. Still, I held manual vector to be the only cooperation between the artist and the computer that offered a new language of form while leaving the artist in charge. On one side there was digital raster painting, where the artist is fully in charge but forms are in no way different from traditional painting. On the other, computer generated painting such as fractal art offered renewal, but the computer seemed to take the lead. Its perfect forms, regularity and repetitiveness, the total absence of a personal brand of clumsiness, felt to me emotionally void.

I proceeded with manual vector for the pleasure to experiment as well as for a practical reason, for it relieved me from the enlargement of raster paintings, which is always a lot of tedious and noncreative work. To overcome my dislike I searched for ways that could lend manual vector some of the soft nuance and broader range of expression of raster. I restrained colors to black-and-white gradients, supplemented with one or two monochrome color planes. Through these clair obscurs I became more or less comfortable with vector, especially with the latest works, Waiting, Diner, Thoughts, Rainy day, Woman.

Looking for ways to soften and deepen manual vector without sacrificing colour I recently started to use Mandelbrot and L-systems fractal forms. Experimenting and opening up to the work of others changed my initial rejection. Although I still feel that it is extremely difficult in this medium to produce something other than sophisticated wall paper, I have come to recognize that a computer generated painting can be a unique and inimitable reflection of the personality of the artist.

Miscellanious
To promote understanding and straighten out some general misconceptions about digital painting I wrote Digital Painting, explained and illustrated 2013-2019, which is now in the Public Domain and can be freely used at www.digitalpainting.be.


Amsterdam, Mach 2019