I grew up on a small farm at the edge of a Dutch polder — flat land, wide sky, a horizon so plain it forced you to look at the light instead. My father kept sheep. I kept a sketchbook. By the time I was sixteen I'd filled a dozen of them with the same empty field, over and over, trying to catch the particular gray of a sky before rain.

“ I paint the same field a hundred times because the light is never the same field twice.

Art school taught me technique I still use — how to build a color up in layers, how to leave a passage unfinished on purpose. What it couldn't teach me was patience with a subject. That came later, slowly, mostly in winter, when the fields turned to snow and there was nothing left to paint but the shape of absence itself.

Twenty-five years in, I finally did the thing I'd been circling for a decade: I sold the studio inland and moved to the coast. I told myself it was for the light — the way it comes in flat and silver off the water, nothing like the buttery light of the fields I grew up painting. Really it was because I'd started to feel the difference between painting a place and painting my memory of a place, and I wanted to close that gap.

That's the year I stopped drawing the horizon line first. It sounds small. It wasn't. Once I let go of needing the canvas to say "this is a field" or "this is the sea," the color could just — go where it wanted. Some of my oldest collectors still ask when I'm going back to "the real paintings." I think these are the real ones.

“ Some days the canvas already knows what it wants. I try not to argue with it.

People ask about influences and I never have a satisfying answer — no single painter, no single movement. Closer to the truth: a half-remembered piece of music, the particular quiet of a church on a weekday, the feeling of a name you can't quite recall. This next one came out of a stretch where I was reading a lot about how different traditions picture the soul — not as a shape, but as a kind of motion.

I'm sixty-one now, still painting most days, still starting from the same honest ignorance I had at sixteen — I don't know exactly what I'm looking for until I've found it. Lately I've been circling back to the dunes near the studio, the same handful of them, the way I once circled that one field at home. I think that's just how I work: not toward an answer, but around one, from every angle I can find, for as long as it takes.

“ Twenty-five years of the same few questions. I'm in no hurry to finish answering them.

That's most of it — the studio, the coast, the slow argument with the canvas that's been going on my whole adult life. Below is a small taste of the rest of the work, and further down, everything at once for anyone who wants to look properly.