about me

I am a visual artist living with my partner Agnes, who is Hungarian, in Belgium and Hungary. We have two sons who live and study in Belgium.

I studied painting at the Academies of Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium, and at the University of Oregon in the US.

​

Since Agnes and I returned to live in Belgium, after a four year stay in Oregon, I have been active as a painter and as co-founder of the experimental space for contemporary art in Antwerp, WorkPlace.

In the spring of 2020, in full lockdown, after a long period of 'soul-searching' I decided to stop my artistic practice in order to fully commit myself to projects related to the convergence of ecological crises we are facing.

​

It is not so that I lost interest in my work as a painter, quite the contrary. But the sense that the planet is literally in imminent mortal danger,  and that it will really be all hands on deck to save our home world and ourselves, became too strong. I had the feeling that I could no longer justify to myself to remain aloof and to invest all my time and energy in my artistic work.

You can read more about that decision and my change of focus in the blogpost 'A Statement of Intention', the first post in my blog.

 

My interest in 'the environment' (a somewhat flawed term that indicates where things went wrong in our consciousness) goes back to my childhood. During my adolescent years, I was already considering a career as an environmental activist. The initiation into the wilderness during my years in the state of Oregon in the US - from 1990 to 1994 - further deepened my love for the wild.

​

In my visual work, after my studies in Belgium and the US, this gradually led to an inquiry into how we form an image of our environment and then take this image for real: the process of constructing meaning and paradigm.

You can read more about this visual research on the page 'About my visual work'.

You can read about my time in the US and the influence that those experiences have had on me and my artistic development on the 'About my path' page (link at the bottom of this page)

 

I write these sentences in the house of my Hungarian-Belgian partner Agnes Nagygyörgy: the 'SoL Retreat Center'

Here Agnes develops her own projects, in which she focuses on teaching people a completely different way of perceiving both the outer world and the inner world in a continuous process of personal transformation.

​

In a sense she and I are on a similar path: our inner universe is identical to the outer universe; as above, so below, as outside, so also inside. To heal our planet we must simultaneously heal ourselves; to heal ourselves we need to learn and change our beliefs and connect with our hearts. To save our planet we need to fall in love with it again.

The SoL Retreat Center is located in a 120-year-old farmhouse in the Somogy province of Hungary. It is a wonderful place, and it is a daily privilege to live and work in such a beautiful environment. It is a daily reminder of what is at stake: not just our survival, but even more so the survival of the beautiful home world we have to safeguard for our children.

There is much work to be done. But that work is the challenge that can also give us all a new life.