I Sent You a Thousand Cards (2016–2017) chapter 27 from The Works,

A Journey into the Invisible

Sometimes life changes gradually.Sometimes it changes all at once.

By 2016, the Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over our lives for years finally fell.

For years we had been involved in a legal battle after our bank had sold us an interest-rate swap. Although we won an injunction against the Rabobank, the victory came at a price. We had only a short time to raise a substantial amount of money.

We sold what we could.

We hoped to refinance our home and studio on the Brouwersgracht, where we had spent years building a place for our family, our work and countless artistic projects.

It proved impossible.

The building had to be sold.

At almost the same time, my marriage came to an end.

One morning, the locks had been changed.

On the first of May 2017, I found myself without a home.

Looking back, I realise that an entire life had quietly come to an end.

I bought an old car and a small caravan.

My plan was simple:

to follow the coastlines of Europe until I discovered where I wanted to begin again.

But the journey had its own destination.

Only a few months later, I arrived in the hills near Santa Catarina da Fonte do Bispo, in the Algarve.

There I bought a small piece of land with the ruins of an old farmhouse.

I parked my caravan on the mountain.

There was no electricity.

No running water.

No comfort.

I had unknowingly stepped into an off-grid life.

The days were shaped by the rhythm of the sun, the wind and the seasons rather than by appointments and deadlines.

Nature quietly became my calendar.

For the first time in decades, life became radically simple.

And strangely, that simplicity felt like freedom.

Already during my travels through Belgium, I realised how deeply I missed painting.

I bought a small box of paint and a stack of blank cards.

Nothing more.

Every day I painted another card.

Small enough to fit in my hand.

Large enough to hold an entire world.

At first they felt like letters.

Messages sent without knowing who might one day receive them.

Eventually I gave the project a title:

I Sent You a Thousand Cards.

One card became ten.

Ten became a hundred.

The journey itself became the studio.

The installation grew slowly, without a plan, one card at a time.

Looking back, I realise these were not small paintings.

They were a practice.

A way of remaining present.

A way of continuing when almost everything familiar had disappeared.

I had lost my home.

I had lost my studio.

I had lost the life I thought I knew.

But I had not lost the work.

The work had become my way of living.

Looking back, I realise that I wasn't trying to rebuild my former life.

Without knowing it,

I had already begun another one.

One card at a time.