Personalia

Handwriting is essential in my work, the sensitivity of gesture, the art of drawing.At home I was stimulated to draw. My father was the Dutch sculptor and enamellist “Go de Kroon”. The amount of cultural history I grew up with has strongly affected my work.

I specialized in the art of lino cutting. I am charmed by it because it is according to traditional methods and it is an indirect way of expression. The material is crumbly, which gives it something headstrong. The figurants in my linocuts are as vulnerable as the material but self-conscious at the same time.

Recognizability is very important to me; in the meaning of figuration but also in the meaning of the ordinary or the notorious.

Accordingly I made landscapes with sheep herds without a shepherd, a still life with a mouse surrounded by French cheese, a Japanese tourist at a jumble sale with paintings in a mountain landscape.

Sometimes my subjects are socially engaged like the series about migrant shopkeepers:
“The Hague Import/Export” or the series “America America, Indians and others,…”.

In the compositions I make with these recognizable things, in more or less realistic situations, I am looking for surprise, estrangement, loneliness. Colors, I make more intense, situations more absurd, people more vulnerable. I treat my subjects with as much irony as love.