Annotations
Inspiration and experience
The word ‘inspiration’ makes me think of the French word ‘inspirer’, breathe in what comes from outside, as opposed to ‘expérience’ and the verb ‘expirer’, about what flows from inside to outside. These two go hand in hand, but I concern myself only partially with inspiration and external impressions, even though I am aware of the affinity between my work and the work of some other artists.
About tools
The tool is not just an extension of the hand, which facilitates its operation, but is also an important mean to bring character to a creation…
Chawan
The tea bowl is part of the tea ceremony in Chinese, Korean and Japanese culture. It has a function alongside
Unity of Surface and Substrate
In the same way that the pictorial representation has shifted from the mere representational to the more abstract, sculpture has also developed over time from the figurative to the conceptual.
Making the familiar strange
What happens in our mind when we are confronted with an unusual situation or when we are faced with an object never seen before.
Colours and ceramics
How can we choose colours for our ceramic work?First of all, it is important…
Unity in diversity
It is high time that someone made it clear that there is a difference between those who use clay as a medium in their artistic expression and those who use clay to make pottery, whether it is functional or not. The fact that one has been admired lately and the other is dismissed as old-fashioned seems to me to be too simplistic. This misconception arose when ceramics were incorporated as a fully-fledged medium in contemporary art, with the result that the potter's craft was suddenly considered to be a thing of the past. However, it is not necessary to view these two tendencies in the same way as some journalists would have you believe lately. One is not being anachronistic a priori if one is still making pots, so to speak, just as it is not the case that only free ceramics as an expression have the future. These coexist and have a different function and arise from a different angle. To elevate one by degrading the other is to violate the natural order. Renewal can happen on both fronts and does not necessarily have to happen by rejecting the old. Personally, I appreciate some contemporary ceramic expressions and I have just as much respect for a simple potter's vase shape. The latter can lead me to the contemplation and wonder that many of today's ceramic creations cannot offer me. Just like a simple tea bowl can significantly increase the quality of my daily life. The difference in approach and the way in which you creatively give shape to the material has everything to do with how you as an artist respond to the major problems and questions of our time. It is not that those who want to bring harmony and beauty into the world have no notion about things, or that they're not able to think, or they're burying their heads in the sand about what's going on in the world, they're just acting and reacting differently from a different mind. Because they believe that the chaos and the big questions, the problems of our time cannot be solved by simply putting them out as raw materials. These questions at are lacking in transformation into a culture of sophistication that is less hurtful, less shocking, less chaotic. This transformation, this attempt at transformation, this catharsis, in my opinion, has just as much reason to exist in order to renew our culture: GVDB.Nieuwe alinea
Nieuwe alinea
When Humanity Loses the Sky
Imagine the sky in a few years: not only during the day, but also at night, filled with drones delivering packages, pizzas, goods, mail—like flocks of birds between the buildings. Cities resemble futuristic comic strips, where nature has been reduced to décor and entertainment. Android robots manage traffic, perform police duties, conduct medical operations, and provide psychological support. They become companions for the lonely, familiar presences, and sometimes even loved ones.
This is not science fiction, but a worldview in which technical mastery has become the highest value. China appears not as a caricature, but as a laboratory: a society using technology as an extension of governability, efficiency, and collective order. This is not a moral judgment, but a statement of fact.
What stands out is not only what appears, but also what disappears: the awareness that there are limits that are not technical, but existential. Transcendence shrinks to ritual memory, nature becomes a resource or décor, and humans are reduced to a node of functions. Neo-Confucianism provides order and duty, but little resistance to a world that seeks to be entirely calculable. Taoist freedom and Buddhist detachment hardly fit an economy that constantly seeks acceleration. Traditions provide continuity, but little protection against a worldview that wants to control everything.
Europe stands in uneasy contrast. Not because it lags technologically, but because it is internally divided. Our civilization is layered: Greek thought on measure and limit, Roman law, the Christian idea of human dignity, the Enlightenment, and ecological awareness. Our spirituality may be damaged, but it is not empty. We still carry—with how much longer?—the awareness that unchecked power turns into hubris. That awareness guarantees no wise action, but nonetheless forms a barrier against total mastery.
This tension is not an abstract cultural debate. It becomes visible where technological rationality penetrates most deeply into our lived world. Not as a contrast between China and Europe, but as the question of whether a civilization still recognizes limits that are not technical. Ecology and science are not peripheral topics here, but test cases: places where it becomes clear whether limits are acknowledged or merely recalculated.
Our ecological awareness can serve as a bridge, not only as a tool for managing problems, but as recognition of meaning that escapes purely technical calculation. It is not about environmental care reduced to CO₂ charts or management models, but about rediscovering nature as something that transcends us. Technology rests on rational applications, and its products remain always the work of humans. Their growing presence in the landscape diminishes the perception of the sacred: what once could evoke a sense of transcendence is increasingly mediated by human scale. As long as nature is approached solely as a system, resource, or variable, it remains in our economic thinking merely as a source of yield.
Only when we also conceive of nature vertically, as a bearer of meaning, does its deeper essence reappear.
In a similar way, this tension is visible in science. The question of whether science can be conducted differently is not nostalgic. It does not mean that facts give way to feelings, but that the human and worldviews guiding our research are made explicit. The idea of value-free knowledge arose historically within a specific economic context; its neutrality was never absolute. Science that acknowledges its own assumptions does not weaken itself; it becomes mature.
Europe’s opportunity does not lie in slowing technology or scientific thought, but in redefining their purpose: both as tools within human scale, not as autonomous forces. Imagination becomes the key: civilizations do not disappear from lack of resources, but because they outsource their dreams to systems. Drones can deliver everything except the “why” of our existence. Preserving that why—the narrow path between resilience and dream—may be the most important challenge of our time.
Nature versus culture
How to deal with the natural space and the transformed cultural space? How can those two realities go together and distinguish themselves from each other? What is a possible harmonious relationship between nature and culture? How we transcend this duality? These are the questions I ask myself and which I’ll try to answer within the framework of my work in which the matter and culture takes his own …
As a human being
As a human being, I am interested in everything under the sun that solicits close investigation. As an artist however…
The Art of failure
As a ceramist, you often encounter surprises and failure is part of the long journey.
No Lotus without mud
When we look with full admiration at an old 12th-century Chinese celadon vase of the song dynasty, what strikes us the most? The shape?
Only the preparation
As a ceramist I am familiar with the construction, the design and the finishing of the clay
Spontaneity
Spontaneity is often disregarded as acting on the good, as the fruit of the accidental,
Beauty and Harmony as an Act of Resistance
There is, in every creative process, a moment that cannot be planned. A moment that begins neither in the head nor in the hand, but somewhere between the two — or perhaps even beyond them. A slight shift, an opening in the material, a direction that presents itself without insisting. As if the form, still unborn, already carried a premonition of itself.
Our gaze has been shaped by years of seeing, losing, waiting. We recognize the small deviations, the tensions that have not yet found a name. But looking alone creates nothing. It is only the opening through which something else may enter.
The hand moves. It knows the resistance of clay, the slowness of drying. It repeats, fails, resumes, and stores its knowledge in a memory older than words. But the hand is not the origin either. It is the instrument waiting for a note that has not yet sounded.
And then, sometimes unexpectedly, a clarity arises that does not come from willpower. An inner impulse that passes through us. The Greeks spoke of nous: an insight appearing like a fall of light. Bachelard would say that matter dreams, Merleau Ponty that vision becomes flesh — but here it is simply the work beginning to gather itself. The Taoists call it wu wei: acting without forcing, moving with what seeks to emerge. It is the moment when the separation between us and the material dissolves.
In that moment, the ordering movement begins. Not as a rule, not as a method, but as a vibration drawing the elements toward one another. Lines find their tension. Hollows open. Colour seeks the one place where it belongs. What once stood apart begins to resonate. As in music, where a counter voice does not collide but supports, a harmony arises in the work that is not smooth but alive; not perfect, but necessary.
Chaos is then no enemy, but an origin. Yet only when it is taken up into this movement — when it is met with attention, discipline, and a shaping force that does not coerce but guides. Freedom without that force dissolves into noise. Form without that force stiffens into decoration. Beauty appears only where the two meet.
This ordering movement is not our possession, nor a property of the material. It is the field that arises between them. A place where the work begins to become itself, and where we are merely its companions.
There, in this moment of convergence, beauty finds its chance. Not as ornament, not as nostalgia, but as a moment of truth in which everything briefly aligns — because it could not be otherwise. GVDB.