Through My Father's Eyes

I am always looking for new perspectives. A few years ago, a befriended artist asked if I wanted to take painting lessons with him. Surprised, yet intrigued—especially since he primarily teaches amateurs—I decided to seriously consider his offer. The subject matter, however, was something I had to choose myself; he couldn’t help me with that.

A week later, I stepped into his studio with a series of digitized slides taken by my father. It felt like a challenge, but also a natural extension of my photographic work: recreating these images in oil paint. With this new technique, I wanted to learn how to completely shape the existing images to my vision. Painting is not just about looking closely; it’s about adding depth to images that were once captured by a camera in another time.

My father observed family life from the outside, as an (amateur) photographer. He took slides, just like so many fathers did back then. Fathers worked and documented vacations on film. On the first slide in the series, he had written the year 1961 in blue ink, right across the bottom of the image—over the deck of the Kruiningen-Breskens ferry. With the car on the ferry, that’s where the holidays began. From there, you sailed off to the end of the world, to weeks filled with endless play and blissful idleness.

Now, I play with the faded colors of the slides from my childhood, bringing tangible memories to life on the blank canvas.