Q: What’s the best advice that you have ever heard or received and that you would like to give other starting artists?
The absolute classic, « Hope for the best; prepare for the worst » is the most useful and realistic advice one can get in my humble opinion.

Q: What’s the worst advice that you have ever heard or received?
You have to produce more if you want to become someone.

Q: What’s the first thing you do in the morning and the last one you do before going to bed?
The immortalization of my little muse is what keeps me busy days and nights. Jo is my “Immortality Project” when I go to sleep, to use the words of Ernest Becker and my “Illusory raison d’être” when I wake up to paraphrase Louis Ferdinand Céline. The funny thing is that when I manage to find a few hours of sleep, I’m losing her in my most recurrent nightmare.

A few pairs of glasses later I entered the Academy of Arts of Brussels and started to learn all the useful things a young artist needs to know to begin his creative journey. It was also there that in 1992 I made the acquaintance of a mesmerizing young lady who just like myself was much more interested in Dutch Renaissance than French Cubism. We moved in together the same year and she made her appearance in the center of my paintings simultaneously. Three decades later, I’m still depicting my little muse painstakingly at a miniaturist scale for the sake of my 52-year-old eyes. To conclude my little story and answer your question properly with complex words that should make me sound more intelligent than I really am, one can say that my relationship with miniature is causal and deterministic.  

Q: Where has your courage brought you as an artist? This question is inspired by Brené Brown’s quote “Creativity is a paradoxical pursuit: The craft of making requires vulnerability and a certain kind of tenderness or openness to the world around us. At the same time, putting our work out in the world today can take a shit ton of courage and tenacity. This is a space to shine a light on the folks who are straddling these tensions and making us all a little better with their art. “

The plain truth, I may as well admit it is that I don’t consider myself as a courageous artist, quite the contrary, actually. I see my little studio as a place of refuge in which I practice cowardly the ostrich policy but if at the end of the day the observation of my humble miniatures can distract someone else from our tragic faith, it means that I didn’t entirely waste my time. Where existential reassurance is at stake, anything is better than nothing, I guess..