Back from Italy and inspired by Marino Marini, I started to paint in the old fashioned way. Finding the right balance between rough and exact. Leaving space for interpretation. Half way through the painting (a nude seen from the back) I got stuck.

I had had big plans; one night I dreamed the title for the ‘absolute painting’: ‘With time all dead flow into one’.

This was a new sensation, to have the title even before having started the painting. After ample reflection and having tried to make some sketches, I came to the conclusion that I will only be able to paint it, when I have become senile and reached the end of my life.

Never ever paint the absolute painting in the strength of life! What to do afterwards?

In the past I would have forced my way ahead. Now, thanks to the fact that I can work in different ways, I hopped over to the other way of painting.

I started a new 'flower' canvas, this time an iris.

image of iris on the easel and next to it the half finished nude seen from the back

Why do I make these flower paintings?

I am passionate about shiny bright colours. A subject that I have painted for years is butterflies. Butterflies as the series of 'Fallen Angels', I started after my New York days, later as the flying pieces of bright colour in for example 'Butterfly man'. I even confess to own a mounted butterfly...

From butterflies to flowers is a small step. Strong colours as seduction! 

One inspiration that made me go in the flower direction I have talked about in my blog of 02-02-2015: Monet’s water lilies.

There were the flower-still-lives of Manet too.

What really did the trick was a show of the watercolours of flowers by Emil Nolde seen in the early 90's. These images stayed in my head for years and years. The intensity of the colours overwhelmed me. 

a collage of flower paintings by: Monet, Manet, Nolde and me (who is who?).

But my interest in colours that light up actually goes further back than the show of Emil Nolde.

It started with a ruby… I saw the painting  ‘Ritratto di giovane donna con liocorno’ by Raffaello Sanzio in the Galleria Borghese in Rome long, long ago.

How was it possible that the ruby gives light???

For years I was puzzled, also because the solution did not fit in my way of working as I found out.

To get a result like that one has to paint a series of transparent layers of colours over the white underground, preferably the original underground. And my usual way of working consisted and often still consists of painting layer after layer of thick colours, trying to surprise myself. Not by carefully calculating!

Art might be the only occupation in which inconsequent behaviour can pay off. In 2011 I started to paint flowers in the ‘new’ technique first in gouache, carefully calculating where to have the white of the paper playing the role under a thin layer of transparent paint. I showed the first results in the show in Laren.

Works in oil paint followed. First 'new' colour to present itself as a breakthough I had had for years, but never used: ‘old Holland red gold lake’. Someone gave me that tube and only with the ruby it got under my attention again. That colour transparent over white glows like hell!

My palet for the 'flower' works has become totally different from the paintings in the ‘old’ way. Here colours like ‘doixine mauve’, ‘manganese violet reddish’, ‘cobalt violet dark’ and the mad ‘old holland yellow green’ play a prominent role. It is fun; often they react different from expected.

And here we are, it is almost summer… Flower 030 is finished (click on the name and the painting appears in a new window). For the moment I cannot produce brighter colours...

The video shows the late Herman Emmink, singing 'Tulips from Amsterdam'...