I consider my early years of artistic practice as formative years. Sometimes, I use the image of a free-range pasture of which I had to define the edges. My love for the old Masters and the sensuality of their visual work had to find a place in my own pasture, along with my admiration for some well-chosen modernists and contemporary artists. I also consider the complete lack of fashionable attitude as a characteristic of my personality and artistic view. Besides a strong intellectual base during these early years, I already wanted the works to have the quality of being ‘visual art’ in the first place; a quality that I tried to develop in the later years as the center of my practice.

In the development of a personal artistic language, I came across the classical typology of the artist as a melancholic. It was Aristotle who defined the artists’ temperament as such. And in studying this idea, I got conscious of the fact that the temperament was part of a whole cosmology. According to this theory, Saturn, as the highest (known) and ice-cold planet had influence on the artists ‘humores’. A person with such a temperament is unbalanced because of too much black bile. His view on the world can be momentaneous high (during creation), but soon doubt and depression comes upon him. His whole worldview turns black. He retires in isolation, contemplation and doubt. Some other characteristics of the melancholic are his interest in geometry. He prefers wood, and black is his color…

Being inspired by this psychological typology, I started making sculptures, referring to this cosmology, by means of largescale, wooden images of celestial bodies. My choice came slowly upon oakwood that I darkened black. I openly refer to medieval and baroque Flemish sculptors who use this hard but characterful wood for their images. This is a small illustration of my desire to continue working in an historical tradition.

Developing this artistic position based upon classical aesthetic concepts, I slowly began to introduce ‘imitation’. To be able to do so, I was obliged to master the old sculptural techniques. But at a certain point, the mimeses were so ‘real’, that they coincided with reality. That was a moment of strong emotional confusion. I almost physically felt the gap there usually is, between art and reality; between us and reality. I thematized this feeling by means of a series of twelve vails, symbolizing the space between the reality and its representation. To me, it was exactly this feeling of a shortage in contact to reality that makes the artist melancholic. Since then, this consciousness was always present in my work. I further expressed this feeling by showing a fragmented reality. A key work from that period are the sculpted hands of ‘Aurora’. To the Greeks, she was the goddess who brought light to the earth, every morning, with the sun in her hands. Just showing this fragment of the human body sufficed to suggest a whole human body and a complete mythological story. Pars pro toto.

As part of this longing for a contact with reality, I always kept the attitude of making drawings in nature, of plants or landscapes. Starting with some series in watercolor, the use of red chalk appeared in the subsequent years.