Artist Statement/Biography

Hailing from the Netherlands, residing in Florida, I’ve been a professional artist since receiving the prestigious “Startstipendium” grant, sponsored by the Dutch government in 1989. I earned a BFA from AKI in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 1988, and an MFA from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio in 1997. I began teaching shortly thereafter. I am currently a full-time faculty member at FSW, in Fort Myers, Florida, teaching multiple art courses in several disciplines.

Large paintings created throughout my studio career display a decidedly Northern European, existentialist attitude toward the role of the artist in society, and attitudes toward the image and life, but since 2000 I’ve become mainly associated with an ongoing body of work titled The Top 100 that had existed as a side project since 1983. Firmly rooted in portraiture and figure painting yet exploring a variety of stylistic approaches, The Top 100 series is the simple concept of visually documenting the music I listen to, which has yielded more than three thousand small- to medium-sized paintings in various mediums. The last 200 of these are double portraits, illustrating historical musical recordings from the field of anthropology. The paintings juxtapose subject and object; the recorder, historically often a middle-aged white male ethnomusicologist, and the recorded, the aboriginal woman. The series document how the relationship of self and other has evolved from a blatant racist colonial attitude to that of self-conscious assimilation. Yet, the relation, in contemporary form, remains problematic. I am equally in awe of subjects and objects.

Solo exhibitions of my work include the alternative non-profit space White Columns in New York; Country Club Projects in Cincinnati; De Bank in Enschede, the Netherlands; Tempus Projects in Tampa; among many other venues, and most recently at the Dublin Arts Council in Ohio. I recently opened The Top 100 Archive and Studio, a space near downtown Fort Myers, Florida, dedicated to the history of the Top 100.