Nature and human spirit.
I keep returning to that thought, because I am not sure where one ends and the other begins.
A dune, yes. A forest, yes. A bird, certainly. But a human being? A village? A city? A row of houses along a road? A swarm of people moving in the same direction every morning?
We are nature too. Only with shoes on. With calendars. With building permits. With bricks, glass, fences, gardens, roads and parking spaces. That does not mean everything we do is innocent. On the contrary. Precisely because we are part of the same system, what we make, break and disturb matters.
All kinds of landscape
We move in swarms. Sometimes close together and sometimes with the occasional individual walking just outside the group. And those swarms create their own landscapes. They make villages, cities, paths and invent borders. The swarms make sounds and have all kinds of habits.
Recently, Hollandse Duinen was officially named a national park. An area with dunes, beach, bulb fields, villages and cities. That is exactly what I find interesting. Not only the supposedly untouched is given a name, but also the composed. The area where humans and landscape have long been moving through each other.
At Kunstschouw in Zeeland, I spoke to someone who told me what happened when an existing area was officially designated as a nature reserve. People came to look around. They went for walks and started pointing things out. And when they saw animals that had already been living there for years, they said: look, they have already arrived.
As if the animals had read the sign. As if that was how it worked 🙂
Who says we are the centre?
Maybe we often find ourselves too important in the story. As if we are the viewers and nature is the scenery. But who says so? In another system, we might simply be prey. Or beasts of burden. Or dairy cows. Or a temporary species that made a lot of noise and thought it was at the top.
For me, nature and human spirit are not separate subjects, but part of the same moving system.
Maybe that is why I do not paint neat landscapes. I paint the tension between small and large. Between sheltering and being present, and between a form that seems built and a world that simply keeps moving around it. Apparently, that is how naturally it goes.
Somewhere in the middle
The houses, greenhouses and small constructions in my work are not romantic little places. Or at least, not only that. They stand somewhere in the middle. In the wind, between earth, colour and movement. As if they are trying to keep existing inside something much larger than themselves.
Maybe nature is not something outside us. Maybe nature is also what we do, make, destroy, protect, name and misunderstand.
And maybe looking only really begins the moment we stop placing ourselves outside the landscape.