Starting point for almost every painting is our collection of found footage: slides and photographs taken from anonymous family albums and other neutral sources. As subject matter for the paintings, I usually select images of fringe locations, derelict places or fragments of events. I prefer places for which there never seemed to be an incentive to capture them on film, but which people have photographed anyway, for reasons that are no longer apparent.

My process of painting is reductive. I limit the use of color to only two or three tones and fade the contours. By doing this, the painting offers considerably less information than the source image. The eye has to strain to identify what can be seen on the canvas. This way the viewer's gaze and attention are held longer by a subject matter which normally would only be noticed in passing. It is the process of this gradual identification of visual data that has my real interest, more so than the subject matter of the painting. This gradual process allows for the establishment of a special bond between viewer and viewed object.

At one point the viewer will, probably completely subconscious and maybe a little frustrated by the lack of visual data, start to fill in the missing information through autosuggestion. In other words, the viewer instinctively starts to develop his own private version of the image. In the process, individual moods, preferences and associations get attached to the painting, creating a private relationship between viewer and viewed. From this we may conclude that the most important thing that can happen to my paintings is that they are seen.