To be honest with you? I used to think that creativity was something for weak people.

For people who couldn’t handle life, had fallen off the bandwagon and now needed to ‘heal’.
It never occurred to me that my creativity could be anything more than a hobby.
Artists were otherworldly creatures that I admired – sometimes to the point of worshipping them – but they were different from me.

Sometimes it’s nice to put in text just to get an idea of how text will fill in a space.

You're invited to read my story

For myself, I chose academia.

I got a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Information Sciences and an MA in New Media & Digital Culture.

My career started out in the avant-garde of the Dutch tech scene.

As a freelance copywriter I was operating under the following assumption: since this is what I studied, now I shall be doing this work until my retirement and then I’ll be free to drink red wine, exude existentialist wisdom, have fun and in general do as I divinely please.

While I was feeling hip and happening for some time, I did have to admit that something felt off.

I was missing something.
Something fundamental.
Something VERY fundamental.

And though I didn’t know exactly what this very important thing was that I was missing, I had an intuition that it had something to do with ‘truth’.

A matter of life and death

The moment it became clear to me that this ‘truth’ matter had actually become a matter of life and death for me, I could overcome my great fear of spirituality and attend my first spiritual retreat in early 2017.

That’s where I found what I was missing.

Turned out my identity wasn’t onefold as I had experienced it to be, but rather: threefold.

Human, body, yes.

But also: Light, prior to and context of the body.

And even: the Absolute, prior to the Light and the body.

This remembrance of Totality temporarily rendered powerless my ideas of who I am, what I am about and what my life ought to look like.

The shift that I needed

It unblocked my creative energy.

And whether I wanted to or not, whether I believed in creativity or not,
I HAD to draw. First with a pen on a small piece of paper that was at hand during that retreat.
Then with permanent markers on A4 sheets of printing paper.
And a year or so later I also started to paint with acrylic paint on canvas.
It was an odd experience to have lost control over my actions and the direction of my life in general.
But this opening also felt fun, wild, free, adventurous and so… NOW!
It was just the shift that I needed.

Creative space

From the city of Utrecht I moved into a spiritual community in a tiny Dutch village called Maria Hoop, let my business go bankrupt, got a job and spent 7 years rewiring my life on the basis of truth.

Creating art helped me tremendously there.

Finally I had the creative space of my own that I so craved having.

A space in which I could merely be.
A space in which I could face and process what I had been suppressing.
A space in which I could feel through and surrender difficult feelings.
A space in which I could contemplate our deeper identities of Consciousness and the Absolute.
A space in which I could feel the desire of my heart.
A space in which I could practice expressing myself boldly.
A space in which I could experience direction from within.
A space where I could feel ecstasy and erotic electricity.
A space in which I could recover my wildness.
A space in which I could practice creative, relational, sexual and spiritual sovereignty.
A space of truth in which I could be… all of myself.

The result of which?

A never ending series of portraits of gods, goddesses, spiritual teachers, artists, philosophers, boyfriends, body parts and whatever else catches my attention.

And it is with great joy that I tell you that my drawings and paintings don’t only beautify my own studio.
They also light up private as well as public spaces in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia.

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