I paint the ones that stopped me.

Something stops me

I find them online. I scroll past nearly all of them — that is what those images are built for, three seconds each, thousands of times a day — and every so often one of them stops me.

I save it without knowing why. Months later it is still there. At that point there is only one way to answer it, and that is to paint it.

So a photograph made to hold somebody for three seconds gets several weeks of oil paint instead, and then hangs in a room where one person sees it every day for years. That reversal is the whole series. It is the only thing I am actually doing here: taking an image made to be scrolled past and turning it into something you have to live with.

Something stops me. Then I have to deal with it.

The women in the paintings

The paintings form one series, Painted Idols. The subjects are women whose own image is their work: they earn a living from being looked at, and most of them are very good at it. That is the part I keep coming back to. The picture is the job, and the job is finished in three seconds.

Every painting carries her first name, and the source photograph is credited underneath. That credit is not decoration. It says out loud that the image did not start with me.

Do they know? I write to them. Every woman whose photograph has become a painting is sent a message about it. Some wrote back, and the ones who did were warm about it. Others never replied — these are accounts with very large followings, where one message from a painter does not stand out — so what I can tell you is that I tried, not that she knows. And writing to someone is not the same as asking them: none of it is offered here as consent.

The whole series, grouped per subject, is on the women in Painted Idols.

The other work, and what it pays for

There is a working week behind this and it is not spent at an easel. Twenty-five years of making images to a brief: 3D design, advertising, software. Building companies, which is mostly other people's problems arriving in a certain order. And work with a stage, an opening night and a date that will not move, where several hundred people are holding tickets before anyone knows whether it is any good.

I did not leave any of that behind and I am not going to. It runs alongside the painting, and it pays.

That is the whole reason it is worth mentioning here. Because the other work pays, no canvas in this studio ever had to be finished, and none of them had to sell. There is no month in which this has to earn anything, and there is no gallery waiting on the next four. Take the pressure to sell away and what is left is the painting you would have made anyway. That is not modesty and it is not a small thing. It is the reason the work looks like this and not like something easier to like.

The other thing those years left me is a working knowledge of how a picture gets assembled — what was decided, what was staged, what was fixed afterwards. Which is probably why the few that still get past me get so far past me.

How the work happens

Days at a time, then a week of nothing, then more days. No schedule and no deadline. I only work when I actually want to, and I have the luxury of meaning that literally.

I have no idea what a canvas will look like when I start, which is also why nothing can go wrong. There is no target to miss. Most of what happens at the easel is not painting at all. It is looking.

The material never changes: an acrylic underpainting, finished in oil, on stretched canvas. One work at a time, several weeks each. There is no version of any of this that is faster.

When it stops

At some point it stops, and this is the part I find hard to explain. The painting is not finished. I am finished. It has been dealt with, it no longer pulls at me, and I can start the next one.

Whether the canvas is done is a separate question and I have never once been able to answer it. So I hang it up and pass the question on.

The wall is the hard part

Ordering one of these takes about a minute. It arrives in an unmarked box, insured, with a certificate in my own name, and nothing on the outside says what is inside.

Then it has to go somewhere. That is the part nobody warns you about. Everyone who walks into that room will see it, and most of them will have decided something about you before they have taken their coat off. Some will think it is beautiful. Some will think it is cheap. A few will say nothing at all, which is its own kind of verdict.

I am not going to tell you those people are wrong, or that the work is respectable, or that it is really about the light. It is a painting of a woman wearing very little, hanging in a room where your visitors drink coffee. That is exactly what it is, and pretending otherwise would insult both of us.

What I can tell you is that the ones who own these stop noticing the reaction after about a month, and never stop noticing the painting.

hang it anyway.

The studio in Boekel

The studio is in Boekel, in Noord-Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands. Every canvas on this site was painted there. There is no second location, no workshop elsewhere, and nobody else at the easel.

Work leaves the studio signed, unframed and ready to hang, and ships insured from the Netherlands to anywhere in the world. What the box looks like when it reaches you is described in full in how your painting is packed and shipped.

I answer my own email. Every message reaches the studio and gets a reply — write to me.

What leaves the studio

• Original paintings — oil on stretched canvas, €250 to €900. Signed, one of one, with a certificate of authenticity. Once a canvas is sold it is gone; there is no second version and there never will be.
• Signed prints — €35 plus shipping. 100 × 80 cm, printed full bleed with no white margin, hand-signed on the back. Fifty per painting, printed once and never reprinted.
• Commissions — a few each year. No deadlines, I may say no, and I decide how it gets painted.

If you are still deciding, the questions people actually ask before they buy are answered on the FAQ, and at more length in notes from the studio.