Biography

No one recognises the female expressions of mind better than a woman herself. The impressions I capture are the emotions I have experienced myself. From childhood I was intuitively intrigued by how people’s facial expressions could reveal their mood and feelings, the tone in which someone ‘looks’ and later in life I was able to depict all these emotional nuances on a canvas.  

A woman being herself is beautiful! The strong physical sensations caused by emotions are numerous and have so much influence on your physical appearance. Think for example of a teenager’s infatuation and heartbreak, endearment, sensual sensation, determination, love, emotion, despair, happiness, pride. And that is exactly why I never get bored and will never be done painting: what happens beneath her skin, beneath the surface, beneath the layers…? And what effect does that have on her facial expression? Recognising these moods in women’s faces never ceases to amaze and inspires me. I have to work on a painting, both in the paint and in the emotions, they reinforce each other….

Everyone lives in their own physical, emotional, and social reality. These emotional cues are, of course, not objective, and the emotional nuances are countless. Because of the transparency of my characters, the imprimatur (the background) is the foundation of the painting, and therefore crucial to the atmosphere, just as in real life, where your frame of reference, your own background, is inextricably linked to you. In the places where the final paint is thinly applied to the canvas, you can always see it peeking through; symbolic of the inability and inability to name what you intuitively sense. That’s what makes it so beautiful and interesting for me as an artist to experience that every viewer of my paintings experiences the atmosphere and emotion in their own way.