Every artist's way into painting is personal. You graduated from the Royal Academy in Antwerp in 2018 with work that looked very different from what you make today: mythological landscapes, bright colour, scenes observed in Italy and Greece. How did you first come to drawing and painting, and what pushed you to leave that early language behind?
The paintings I graduated with were more inspired by mythological stories and by the landscapes I saw while traveling. Nowadays, I draw more inspiration from my direct environment. For me, there was no drastic change over the years from when I graduated until the paintings I make now. Little by little, the way of painting changed. I used my time in the academy to experiment and to search for what I wanted to paint. Now, I have the feeling I have a clearer idea of what I am working towards.
Your paintings often look like frames taken from a moment when rain and humidity have soaked into ordinary life, and certain creatures appear to inhabit it. What does water mean to you, both as an image and as material on the canvas?
I use water as a reason to paint reflections or raindrops. I also use water to put it in contrast with the static objects that I paint. Therefore, I can bring water into my painting to paint in a more dynamic and looser way. As a result of that, sea creatures appeared in my paintings to literally give them more life. At the moment, I am painting more waves in my paintings to make the water even more dynamic and as a reason to use big brushstrokes.
There is a stillness in the way you paint moonlight on water, or the first light filtering through thick fog: a rarefied, dreamlike space where the viewer is surrounded by silence. And yet many of your titles suggest something far less peaceful, Threatening, Struggling in Bad Weather. What is holding the calm in place in those paintings, and what is pressing against it?
The atmospheres I try to paint are the atmospheres that catch my attention in real life. It is also a way of painting that I feel most comfortable with: the calm and meditative paintings. I always give my paintings titles after I finish the painting. I try to see what is happening in the painting and what kind of feeling it is giving me. I start painting with the intention to make a calm atmosphere by using a specific combination of colors and by using a specific kind of object. So, the first intention to visualize a specific kind of atmosphere might not always end up the exact way I was trying to paint it. That's why the titles sometimes might suggest something else than the first intention while making the painting.
Snails, lobsters, mussels, sailing ships, fallen branches: your work returns to a fixed cast of forms. How does an object earn its place in that vocabulary, and what does it feel like to paint the same creature again, years later? Has anything ever left the repertoire?
The shapes of the objects are important to me. I like to play with light and shadow. Most of the objects have a round shape or don't have too many details, which makes it easier to figure out how the light will fall. Also, their themes are important to me. Almost everything has to do with nature, which makes it interesting to make new combinations to create a new environment or a mood, and to see how the objects in the painting interact with each other. This makes it possible for me to reuse objects and make new combinations with them or change the lighting. It is difficult to say if anything has left my repertoire because sometimes I don't paint an object for a year or two, and then after a while, I want to incorporate a theme from a few years ago.
