I am a Dutch artist who has moved around some in my life.  And every country in which I have lived has inspired my art – and every country has left enduring influences in my work.

Born in Russia, I studied art in Belgium.  After living and working in the Netherlands and the United States, my home is now in the beautiful province of Abruzzo in Italy.

My art

Having spent many years using my art as a way to satisfy my obsession with human behaviour – in particular our strengths and vulnerabilities as we go about our daily lives – personal tragedy drove me to turn my focus inwards … towards myself and my own emotions. 

I became driven by ideas of transience and impermanence … mortality, eternity … the awareness of  generational threads that may bind or may break … how memories may be recalled and how memories may be erased. And now, in my latest works, I draw on themes of silence, poetry (especially that of Pessoa and Pasternak) and just living a life.

My process

Ideas made emotion, expressed by texture and rhythm.

It’s as if pictures are tattooed inside my head, driving a process which eventually defines the style, palette, medium and the scale of what I paint. The result is an abstract expressionist style of painting which I call “evocative abstract”.

While the resulting work can be viewed as purely abstract, my paintings are intended to evoke objects, feelings and memories for the viewer.

Whether these feelings and memories relate to those felt by me, the artist, is not important. What is important is that people who see my art may be stimulated to delve further and explore their own perceptions of the world and their own emotions.