What and who inspires you?
I find inspiration in the little, everyday things. It could be anything, from a dog that stubbornly refuses to come for a walk and lies on its back on the sidewalk to incredibly clumsily folded napkins at a restaurant.
I get a huge amount of inspiration while walking through the city. Brussels is a wonderful city, everything is a bit haphazard. There's a tremendous amount of story and melancholy hidden behind every facade. I can really lose myself in it and suddenly realize I've been staring at a pattern or a fold in a curtain for an inexplicable amount of time. Sometimes I quickly trace a pattern in my sketchbook and then incorporate it into a painting.
In this painting, I worked in a similar way. I painted on a chic white tablecloth. I found this fabric in an antique cupboard at my grandmother's house. I drew a grid pattern on it with a childhood marker, inspired by the graph paper you get served under your plate at a dinner party. Then I worked on this drawing with oil paint, which destroys the water-based nature of the marker. As a result, in this work, this grid pattern (associated with the rational) is destroyed by impulsive brushstrokes (emotional).
Agnes Martin's writings are also very inspiring to me. I wish I'd written this quote myself:
“My work is non-objective … but I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape, so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape.”
How do you, as an artist, interact with matter/material?
Every material is like poetry to me. I often work with fabrics and surfaces not meant for painting, like the tablecloth in this print. Because of this, you never know how the material will react to the paint. Coincidental, unexpected things happen. For me, this is the story the material itself wants to tell, and I simply provide the space for it.
I also make my own paint, which always leads to interesting experiments. In this print, for example, you see a large "oil slick." These are actually accidents that you can't predict during the process, but which I find incredibly fascinating. This way, I engage in a dialogue with the materials, even though I don't know exactly what to expect. As a creator, I get a lot of energy from allowing chance to arise and playing with it.
