Introduction
I was born in The Hague in 1939 and was educated at the Free Academy in The Hague under the guidance of the dutch video art pioneer Livinus van der Bundt. At the beginning of my career in the 1960s I did a lot of graphic work like lithographs and screen printing.
At recurring periods I worked in France. The bond with France increased all the more when I came to live in Het Bildt, an area in the north of Friesland, in 1975. The national character of the frisian and french people and the grandiosity of the landscapes were a great inspiration for my work.
In 1985 works of art developed for the first time with poetry as a starting point. That inspired me again to use the texts by the french chansonnier Leo Ferré. I was looking for a way to make more use of the visional use of language and the sound of Ferré in my work. And so I tred in the footsteps of my earlier master Livinus van der Bundt with my first art video ‘Leo Ferré chante’. Together with Lucie de Blécourt I set up ‘Atelier 11’ in 1996 in which our works have been collected. In the 1990s several videoworks with poetry and lyrics as starting points have followed.
As a result of the audio-visual experiences the Media Art Festival Friesland was formed in 1995 in cooperation with the ‘Theater Romein’ in Leeuwarden. In 2000 Media Art Friesland was set up so as to increase the attention for media art in the province of Friesland. My autonomous work as a result of this obviously started to take a back seat. As Conservator/Director I built up the annual international presentation of media art. In 2006 the Festival will celebrate its 10th anniversary.
The Festival and the international media art are a great source of inspiration. My audio visual forms of art have developed greatly in the last few years. Slowly I am passing on the ropes to a younger generation and hopefully will get more time and space to concentrate on my own work again.
