BIOGRAPHY
About me​
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From a very young age, I’ve been fascinated by natural history, an unavoidable side effect of being exposed to large doses of David Attenborough documentaries in the womb and a visit to the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels with my parents when I was four years old. I regard that museum visit, when I laid my eyes on the famous Iguanodon skeletons of Bernissart for the first time, as one of the most formative events of my life. It was this visit that unlocked what would become a life-long obsession with dinosaurs and other prehistoric life, eventually setting me on a course to study biology at university with the intent of becoming an evolutionary biologist. To this day I visit those Iguanodon fossils at least once a year. And to this day they still give me goose bumps every time I see them.
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Also from a very young age, I had an unstoppable urge to draw. I was drawing all the time as a kid, as the pages of my old school books can attest to. Drawing, for me, was never just about producing a picture or passing the time. It was – and still is- a fundamental part of how I observe and understand the world. It wasn’t long before the two passions met. I would collect fossils, animal bones and insects wherever I could, and started documenting them in my sketchbooks, where they graced the pages alongside drawings of dinosaurs and dragons. I would fancy myself something like a Victorian naturalist, like Charles Darwin or Marianne North, or like one of the many rugged paleontologists I used to see on National Geographic.
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Other themes started showing up in my art as well: influences from science fiction and fantasy. I remember my mom reading the Dragonlance book series by Weiss and Hickman and me being obsessed with the brightly colored cover art produced by Larry Elmore. More recently, the influence of surrealists, the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and ideas from local folklore has been seeping into my artwork. Furthermore, where once almost exclusively worked in graphite and rarely used colour at all, I started studying painting at the Academie Haspengouw Beeld in Sint-Truiden where I gained an appreciation for colour. Nowadays, most of my work is painted in acrylics. The ‘spirit of the naturalist’, however, remains evident in all of my work, whether I’m working in pencil or acrylics, whether I’m drawing an existing animal or constructing a creature from folklore.
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Expos
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Kastkunst
Collage/Assemblage
Vitrinetour 2023
Exit Expo 2024
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