Many times I was thinking on my next step in painting (usually in the beginning of each year), I experimented with what I knew just to get my mind of things, I guess. In this case I 'fixated' the artificial fur, not with oil paint but with enamel paint for cars, using spray cans. “Pink Forests” (Each 130 x 270 cm.)
For the same reason I kept experimenting with fur-paintings, I did with enamels-paintings. I made some more in the series 'Spanish Flu’ but instead of children-beds I painted the room itself. In this one it’s the view from the hallway into an empty room, only showing a window. Spanish Flu (enamel on canvas, 180 x 180 cm).
In this painting, it’s still dark inside the room, but the first morning light is showing thru and underneath the partially drawn curtains. Spanish Flu (enamel on canvas, 180 x 180 cm).
I even made one enamel painting on a clear sheet of plexiglas glass, or that's to say, I painted the Gecko (enamel on plexiglas glass, 100 x 200cm) first, than the red background on top of it, than flipped the work and mounted it on the wall of my studio garden (that by now had grown a bit).
Poster design for the play 'De Pijnders’, which was loosely anchored on the phenomenon of men who carry heavy sacred statues around their villages each year, an old religious ritual that still exist all over Europe. Basically, the play was a story about suffering.
So, for the play 'De Pijnders' I came up with the idea of the seesaw. This because I was wondering how an exercise machine would look like for these carriers of heavy religious statues. So I thought of a training device (100 x 600 x 700 cm), that could only be used by a group of people (actors), who had to keep the machine in balance, depending on where they would be standing in relation to each other…
…Not only had the actors keep the seesaw in a balance according to the story of the play 'De Pijnders', they also had to carry around heavy training equipment, after all, this play was about training for a life of suffering...
The whole play of 'De Pijnders' was underscored by the live music of composer/musician Jean-Yves Evrard.
Around the same time I got a phone call, if I would be interested to do a set design for the upcoming tour of the band “Absynthe Minded”. Sure I was, so I invited the singer songwriter into my studio to have a chat. Eventually I came up with the idea of a visualisation of wind. Impossible, I know, but so is visualizing music. I thought of hollow silk tubes that were gently rocked by (an electric motor) the framework they were suspended on. (Although the movement could as easily be done with one or two ventilators.) They liked the idea but later on there was an argument about the price and not much later the band split up. I liked the idea too, so I kept it in mind for later use. (Which I did in 2013.)
It wasn't the last time I worked on the conundrum that was wind. Although I did (and do) a lot of photography, I have never used it as a work in itself. But I did use it regularly as a basis for videos. Like in this video-installation 'Desert Wind'.
Ghosts were at least as elusive as the wind. In this video-installation I was inspired by the “Yūrei”, the Japanese version of a ghost. The music "Nisemono No Uta" is from Susumu Yokota (°1961-✝︎2015).
Sometimes it happens that someone send me a photo and in this occasion I transformed it into the video-installation 'Wings'. (Shown at Buda Centre in Kortrijk.)
Come to think of it, that year I did a lot of videos. The thing that all my videos had in common was that they were build in Adobe Flash. (Flash was eventually killed off in 2014 by the introduction of HTML5.) For Instance this video 'Keine Melodien' (fragment) with the music from Jeans Team.
Another thing I found interesting was the student project from 2004 by the architect MD, a concept-maquette of a “Treehouse” made with actual concrete. It ended up in one of the video “Trees”.
Some years ago I designed two labels for the German brand Premium-cola, a coke that had so much sugar and caffeine in it, you got a kick in ass when you drank it. That's how I came up later with the idea of this ad.
“Medusa” was part of a short animation movie I did just for the fun of it.
Although I did many more videos and animations, I end it with possibly one of my favorites, “Dragonfly”.
As I was saying, I kept going back to making fur-paintings now and then, “Treeline” (monochrome phthalo green, oil on artificial fur, 135 x 300 cm).
And one more fur-painting in the series Last Suppers, “Last Supper Standing” (monochrome cadmium yellow, oil on artificial fur, 260 x 270 cm). For some reason or another I kept making paintings in this series, maybe because the subject fits so well with the material.
“The Seance” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm) was part of a small series (small in size, not in numbers) I called the White Paintings, for lack of a better word. They’re like fragments of reality, little stories if you will, from photos, newspaper clippings etc. I didn't look at them for quite a while and realized that they have never left the studio. “The Seance” was inspired by an old 19th century (fake) photo of a seance.
“Obsolete” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm). Old technics die, just as people do.
“Prison Dog” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm), based on one of the photos from inside the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
“The Trench” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm). From WW1 photos.
“Curiosity Killed The Girl” (oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm). This painting was not based on any photo but on a story.