I rarely paint a landscape exactly as I saw it. For me, landscape painting from memory is not about reproducing a place exactly as I saw it.
What stays with me is often something else: a colour, changing light, the movement of wind or the atmosphere of a particular place.
In memory, landscapes shift.
Colours intensify, forms disappear and details become less important.
That is often where a painting begins.
While painting, recognisable forms can dissolve into colour, lines and layers. A mountain can merge with vegetation. Water does not have to remain blue. What matters is not whether the place is accurately described, but whether something of the experience remains.
The same happens closer to home, during my walks through the Dutch bulb-growing region. Fields, greenhouses, woodland and changing skies find their way into my work, altered by memory and by painting itself.
1. Into the woods – again. Painting on paper – 2026
For me, landscape painting is not about preserving what a place looked like. It is about discovering what remained.
