BALANCING THE WINDOWSILL

Balancing on the Windowsill

This series began with looking.

Walking through Haarlem, and later The Hague, I became absorbed by something specific to Dutch interiors: the objects placed in the front window. Two identical pots. Matching plants. A pair of figures, always symmetrical, always facing outward. You see it everywhere, once you notice it — a quiet insistence on arrangement, on display, on the threshold between the private home and the public street.

I started photographing these windows. Then scratching into the photographs. Shooting from outside looking in, and from inside looking out — testing where the boundary actually was. What I found was not a boundary at all, but a dynamic: the Dutch window is a public vitrine. You show what you have, what you are. And the person on the street is both audience and voyeur — looking in, knowing they are permitted to look, which is a different thing from looking through glass that was never meant to be seen through.

No other culture does this quite the same way. I began to wonder why. The Netherlands is a flat country — flat and coastal, defined by horizon. There is no natural shelter, no hill, no valley to disappear into. Perhaps the decoration in the window is a response to that flatness: a way of reaching toward the horizon, of marking yourself against the open sky, of saying I am here, this is mine, this is what I place between myself and all that space.

This research fed into my final work at Vrije Kunstacademie Haarlem. Then I put it down. Over the following years, in the studio, I moved away from the motif entirely — working to find my own language, my own mark, the handwriting that was genuinely mine rather than borrowed from what I thought painting should look like. That search took time. It took letting go of other things first.

When I came back to the window, it was from a different place. The symmetrical objects, the vitrine logic, the inside-outside tension — these are no longer subjects I am documenting. They have become a way of thinking about painting itself: what we place on the sill between ourselves and the world, how we arrange it, and whether we are performing for the street or simply trying to feel the horizon.