I can still vividly see myself at eight years old, standing alone in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. My class had moved on. I stayed, completely absorbed, until a teacher came back to pull me away. That was the moment I knew I wanted to make a painting that could hold someone the way that one held me.

I grew up with the Dutch masters and with the flowers and landscapes of the Netherlands. Oil paint felt like the natural language for what I saw and felt. For years I painted still lifes and landscapes — especially flowers, and most of all poppies. Colour and expressive brushwork were always at the heart of the work. Gradually the forms loosened. The flowers became freer and more open, until one day the transition to abstraction felt inevitable.

I was drawn to abstraction by a desire to paint the essence of what I see, to take away the clutter and leave space for the viewer’s imagination. It felt like a natural next step, a freer way to express the same love of colour, movement and feeling that had always driven my work. The gestural paintings I make now carry that freedom, and they still carry my Dutch heritage with them: the light, the colour, the flowers that first stirred me, and the painterly tradition that began with the old masters. Sometimes a flower still appears, unexpectedly, as if the past is simply finding a new way to speak.

I work both with intention and by letting the painting lead, a balance of control and surrender that feels essential to the gestural work.

I paint because that early longing never left. The brush, the paint, and the movement across the surface remain the clearest way I know to answer it, and to carry where I come from into what I make today.