Personally, I do not experience any difference in creativity whether I’m cooking, painting, writing, making love, telling jokes or talking to a stranger. You can be creative on every level of your existence. Art and creativity, to me, is a universal language that can be spoken by anyone at any time. 

Armando, one of the most influential Dutch artists since WWII, was a journalist, poet, sculptor, painter, actor, boxer and a violin player. He liked to see himself, and his oeuvre, as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk‘. A German term that roughly translates as ‘the synthesis of the arts’ and describes an artwork, design, or creative process where different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole. Other great artists I admire, like Jan Wolkers and Jan Cremer were also multidisciplinary in their arts and way of life.

This way of embodying creative and artistic processes is also represented in the concept of the ‘Uomo Universale’ or ‘Renaissance Man’, which considered (wo)man to be the center of the universe, limitless in their capacities for development, and led to the notion that (wo)men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.

Put in this perspective, my work as a cameraman allowed me to meet any person from president to beggar. It allowed me to be present during events that make up the news when they were still raw and unfiltered, before stereotypes and (mis)interpretations could mangle their contexts. I witnessed the ongoing refugee crisis up close.

I have seen earthquakes, war zones as well as birthdays of hundred-year-olds and multimillion-dollar properties. I have had the chance to show audiences what was happening in different parts of the world and make up my mind about what I had seen first-hand.

Riches I could never have gathered if I had stayed in my studio for two decades. 

Now I can translate what I have witnessed into writing and painting, making these experiences the essence from which I conceive my art. 

I deem my work as a cameraman to be essential to my creative process. It allows me to personally observe what most of us hear about only through media. I consider it a great privilege to witness these unfiltered realities first-hand before they get mangled by (mis)interpretations and often biased contextualization. In this purest form, they make up the best raw materials for my artistic investigations.