Techniques & materials

My main medium is oils which I prefer to acrylics because of their glow and intensity and because they take substantially longer to dry. Oil colours thus provide greater opportunity for blending and they perhaps require more patience; suiting my artistic approach.

Starting a new painting I first make a lot of lines and shapes on the canvas, fully by coincidence and turning the canvas around while doing it. I usually have an idea or emotion in mind, and I search for figures or shadows which emerge from the patterns on the canvas following my intuition. There is never an overall plan for the painting beforehand; it grows forth by itself as I go along with it. When I feel the painting to be on the wrong track, I paint over a part or all of it and start afresh, making it a series of steps building up and destroying parts until everything comes together.

I love colour, a fact which I believe is quite visible in my paintings. I mainly use the Fragonard, Extra Fine Artist’s Oil colours as I like their consistency and colour intensity, but also Blockx, Old Holland, Schminke Mussini or other brands when a particular colour improves the work. I use the colours pure and sometimes add linseed oil to obtain a more oily consistency. The canvas sides are always painted, because it also allows to display them in a floating frame.

Another medium I love to work with is ink. For ink drawings I use conventional Chinese ink, mainly just black on white. Occasionally I have experimented with coloured ink, or a few blotches of acrylic paint underneath the ink to augment specific parts of the drawing. I use different types of paper texture to suit my mood and theme of the artwork.