The joost files

I started with still lifes. I’ve been drawing with some friends on a weekly basis for over 30 years. We started the drawing club at art school, to imporve our drawing skills. Often acompiened with a glass of wine, listening to some obscure jazz music. Meanwhile…

The taste of earth. Memory and storage.Seeds can sleep for hundreds of years before they wake up and sprout. The memory that lies in the earth goes back thousands of years.The earth has a different standard of time, no fleeting pace or wink. The breath of the earth,…

When Tears turn to stone. There is something quietly powerful about placing a few objects together. In this still life photograph, I arrange a wooden branch, a stone, fragments of wool, and other natural materials collected during my daily walks. Each object carries…

The still lifes, or small installations as I call them are not always left in peace. Sometimes one of our cats comes along to check if everything is in place.

The boulder’s time is not my own,and yet we meet, just in time.In a brief instant, the rhythmsbrush, embrace, and intertwine.Then they release, and each onefollows its own course. The stone has traveled farther than I ever could.It seems to have come from…

There was the memory, the reflection, and the absorption. All in one. The rocks looked at me, and I saw my own breath feeding the life that lived in their small niches.A disruption in time, a discrepancy between two worlds touching for an undefined period.I thought I…

When the gentle thought touches you,Be quick to respond—welcome her in.Feel the warm tingling in your hands,And hope she will stay for a while. Her first visit may be brief,But as you grow to know her better,She will linger longer Don’t be afraid of her…

A lot of things wait and ripen for years in my studio before I have the courage to use them in a setting for a photo shoot. Some objects are difficult. They look, at first glance, obvious. Too obvious. Like a Coca-Cola can, a doll, or a bullet. They are just that, and…

Scanning through my photos I suddenly have to think about Antoni Tapies. The canvas enduring gestures and left with traces of actions. The stones near where I live have endured and are shaped by time. Like the biggest artist of all, Time shapes and creates with…

For where I went I did not know the rituals and customs. It was a language without word or gestures. But they understood each other. They knew were to go and how to go about it. There is that strange feeling that you suddenly enter a world but you can’t speak…