My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image.

As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile.

I don't paint, I hit.

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.

I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.

Through play, we renew contact with childhood – My art is childlike.

You have to learn it all, then forget it and start again like a child. This is the inner evolution.