Tattoo

De tekeningen van Eisenstein kende ik uit een boek. Ik dacht dat ze nooit publiek zouden worden, maar nu hingen zo ongeveer om de hoek. Voor mijn gevoel ging ik er buiten adem heen. Toen ik de galerie binnenkwam was het of ik water zag branden. Een top-kunstervaring zoals je maar weinig meemaakt. Het werk ademde zo’n vitaliteit dat het een deur opende naar tekenen in totale vrijheid. Door het boek had ik al een sterke identificatie, maar in het echt was het een explosie. Dit ben ik! Dit doe ik ook!

Flaccid

Black pencil on 9" x 11" sheets of paper, individually framed
Mounted on plywood panel in 2026. Background color: Farrow & Ball #314
First published in Butt Magazine #4, 2002 (Family and Friends)

Spreads and pages

Drawing and dancing are branches of the same tree. Eisenstein showed Arnoud that drawing is a line in motion, that drawing is a movement that pauses but can also start again. This led to the next step: the realization that you can arrange the sheets of paper in a sequence and keep changing it. Suddenly, the wall in his studio was covered with drawings arranged in lines and thus in a specific order. They were hung as spreads, so that each drawing resembled a page from a book with the spine cut away. But the order—the narrative—could also change again.

DOE HET NIET (Don’t do it)

“I saw a photo in the newspaper of the opening of the Corpus Museum in Leiden, where visitors walk through a human body. Queen Beatrix was standing inside a mouth with massive teeth, holding a bouquet. She was posing on the tongue, and the photographer was standing at the back of the throat. That angle was amazing, so I drew that image behind ‘DON’T DO IT’. The throat often appears in my drawings. When my mother heard that a 16-year-old neighbor boy had been killed in an accident during his first ride on his new moped, she was so horrified she almost threw up. Swallowing out. I’m still sensitive to throat sounds and swallowing."

Solipsistic Skies

He ejaculated on the paper, outlining the blobs with watercolour crayon. Once it had all dried, he made everything around these constellations black with pencil. The drawing then became a window looking out towards a cosmos-like world, full of nothingness. This blackening process was a monotonous task, which allowed him to withdraw happily into the right side of the brain, where timelessness rules.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

FGT's paper stack works are 'interactive, minimalist sculptures composed of large piles of commercially printed paper that invite viewers to take a sheet, exploring themes of loss, renewability, ownership, and the democratic distribution of art. By allowing the work to be depleted and replenished, they act as monuments to memory and impermanence.' Over the years I collected quite a few of them and in 2024 I copied them with pastel crayons, as precise as possible. For a better understanding of FGT's intentions, I give them away for free as well.

Unqualified / Try Harder

I’m still sensitive to throat noises and swallowing. All sorts of things came together in that drawing. Technically speaking, pastel was my discovery, alongside line drawing. Still, I’d rather not be in that realm of drawing. With a negative self-image, fears, and perceived shortcomings, the personal quickly becomes a slippery slope. With a lack of self-worth, who or what are you then? Doesn’t being an artist benefit from a healthy ego?

Another Erased Drawing

Unframed Drawing

Herman Heijermans

At the time my boyfriend was writing a biography of the Dutch playwright Herman Heijermans, who lived from 1864 to 1924. Heijermans was all over the house, in books and in pictures. I choose this one, because of how he stares into the camera. I drew two 'prints' next to the original one and framed them individually.

Tekeningen 1995 - 1997

Met een zweepje onder z'n oksels geklemd 'berijdt' een naakte man een op z'n kop staand paard. Terwijl hij met z'n anus over de paardenlul glijdt, perst een eveneens naakte vrouw zich met moeite in het poepgat van het rijdier. Om haar daad kracht bij te zetten, duwt ze met haar hand tegen een denkbeeldige muur - een muur die tevens de kadrering vormt van het op papier getekende seksspelletje. (Nathalie Faber - Het Parool 3-2-1998)

Bert Luttjeboer

Susan Sontag

I've always thought of photography as something very magical and it is my belief that this is based on a genuine experience: in my early childhood there must have been no sharp distinction between a real thing and its image - in the same way that kids see themselves as inseparable from their mother until the age of three, I thought that object and image were simply two different manifestations of the same energy.