Yes, that's what I have painted. There are more than 7 billion people in the world, so I had to constrain myself to a limited number of lives. However, this immediately raised questions such as which themes do I choose? And, as I can’t paint lives from all cultures, which ones do I select? And how do I tell a lifelong story in a painting? What you finally see are the solutions I found to these questions. As the paintings would be quite large - I could not get entire life stories on a canvas of 1 square metre - I was faced with a storage problem. That’s why for practical reasons these consist of multiple panels. The wall of my studio was just high enough to be able to see them as a whole. It turned out that the panels worked out very well to tell the story of a life. All the life stories end in the middle of the painting. I am very happy to have finished them. It was quite an undertaking, but it was satisfying, totally satisfying.
Well, the work was created in different stages, and it took more than 6 months to complete it. To be honest, at first I had no idea what the work was about. It just became bigger and bigger. It needed space. When I thought it was finished, I spent a couple of weeks looking at it, to discover what it was actually about. It is an abstract painting, what was it connected to? I felt it had to do with the 10 life story paintings I made earlier. By looking at it, its meaning gradually became clear to me. With all these colours and shapes you can create the other 7 billion lives, and much more. Despite the similarities, no two lives are the same. Sometimes there is no choice, which is what we call fate. In the case of a fatal disease or winning the lottery, for example. Sometimes it is less about fate and more about choosing: for example when choosing a profession or the right partner to start a shared life with. Sometimes it’s easy to choose what we want, and sometimes we have to make hard choices. Life is a big creative choice adventure.
It's about dreams and creativity. After entering the doorway, you find yourself in the realm of dreams. Dreams are quite often confused with imaginative thinking. But dreaming is really something else, a different state of being. Dreaming is a creative process in our brain when we are asleep. Just like children who are playing during the day. When children are playing, the things they do just happen naturally - actually in a very creative and mindful way. When I create something as a painter, I am playing. I follow anything that catches my inner attention. I can only be really creative if my adult thinking is at a very low level. For me as an artist, painting is an experience of being. It is about my senses, my feelings, my intuition, my memories. It is about colour, shape and atmosphere. It is about a desire to make something of life visible, something I can only experience in myself. When I am painting, I don’t think, I just follow anything that wants to express itself naturally in me. Internally, I focus on what makes me smile and gives me a feeling of fulfilment. For me, painting is a form of prayer, meditation.