In the year 1999 I started painting men. It became my own sort of private ‘genre’. Men on the street with dogs, children and other small folk. For it’s very suspicious for a man alone to be out on the street at night, but give him a dog and he has an alibi.

Women don’t like the streets at night, so this man gets to meet all kind of similar souls wandering around. This non-heroical brotherhood I find strangely fascinating. It’s not as if we are very purposeful, but we recognize ourselves in the others.

Of course, being a painter, it’s more exciting to paint people in full daylight. I can use all kinds of colours and create a certain atmosphere, give them a certain mood. They’re not portaits of an actual person, the people I paint are characters. Therefore in most cases the faces are merely sketched in.

These paintings are scenes of everyday life as I see it. In them I give clues about things I deem to be of importance, by painting some things more ‘real’ than others. The shoes, a piece of clothing, a dog or a child, plastic carrier bags, everything that can help create the atmosphere that I want.