Art experiments

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The first experimental films I made were made on the beach in my early teens with my parents Super 8 equipment. One film depicted a friend coming out of the sea dressed in a bed sheet as a toga and reading a book. Later on, I filmed a pig's head being thrown towards the sea off a high cliff. I also would film the sand and driftwood constructions that I made on the beach. These rather crude filmic efforts were, in a sense, a sort of mythic homage to the sea and the stories that surrounded it.

In my adulthood, I traveled to Polynesia and I spent many months hopping from island to island living with locals in small villages. I then made a long Super 8 film called Fiji View-master which used a children's toy slide viewer as a visual prop and special effect generator.

T.v.A. I was there on a writing residency. When I work on a new play, I choose to go and work by the sea, usually on an island. This is not on purpose. When I write, I do not want to be disturbed by normal life. I am not attracted to mountains nor to warm countries. I end up in places like the north of Norway or the islands of Great Britain or Newfoundland.

In fact, I do have a practice of painting the sea every day – this does open my mind. I go to the same spot on the beach in Ostend and make a polaroid image of the sea. Then I paint the polaroid. Every time I think: Puh, this is a difficult one; I don’t know if I can do it. But when I start, I don’t have that thought anymore. I conquer the fear of starting and that makes it easier to start.

Taking the photograph → is not directly connected to my artistic development → but the practice of taking the pictures and then painting them makes it valuable for me on an artistic level. It’s become a developing work of 150 little paintings.The sea has rarely been the subject of my work. But, in fact, I did make a 160 min. video of the sea, I’ve also drawn and painted the sea before; I developed a pastel technique for drawing the sea.

In the texts I’ve written, the sea has always appeared one way or another. But only for a minute or so. Seabirds, also appear regularly. On the other hand, I’ve never talked about birds of prey or of mountains. The city + the sea form a universe from which I draw.