Het onaangedane Nederlandse platteland

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30×60 cm, 2025 
The Untouched Dutch Countryside was inspired by the book Het ontsnapte land by Dutch author Geert Mak. In the book, Mak travels through the Dutch countryside, retracing a journey his father made as a young boy. As he moves through the landscape, he reflects on how it may have looked in his father’s time, and on the memories of his father, who passed away.
What particularly stayed with me was the idea of a landscape that exists simultaneously in the present and in memory. The countryside we see today is not the same landscape his father experienced, yet traces of that earlier world remain. This made me think about how places are transformed by time, and how our memories can preserve landscapes that no longer exist.
I translated this idea into a quiet, layered landscape. Rather than depicting a specific place, I wanted the painting to evoke the feeling of looking at a landscape through memory: familiar, but slightly distant and elusive. Through successive layers of paint and subtle marks, parts of the landscape appear to emerge while others recede or almost disappear.
The painting therefore becomes a trace — of a landscape, a memory, and a moment of contemplation. With The Untouched Dutch Countryside, I invite the viewer to pause and enter a space between what is remembered and what is still there.