For four years, I lived on the island of Bonaire a part of the Leeward Islands, part of the Caribbean Netherlands. Unforgettable!
The coral beaches, the sea and the space were of a distinct beauty : the colourite breathtaking.
The solitary spaces, the silence as if on another planet, secluded, lonely, alone with emerald nature : the water, or deep blue , ominous as the often threatening skies. Especially the Washington Slagbaai reserve seemed of another world, with desert-like plains full of cacti and desolate spaces that led to the sea with coral-red stripes and empty open spaces along the edge of the sea, sometimes full of jagged rock formations thrown into the sea as if thrown from a cyclops. A single sapling , an oddity, off-white pipe coral hemmed sea. The silence and desolation was audible.
An occasional rock formation with inside ancient inscriptions and drawings of animals in sienna, testimonies of a distant past of man-eating Indians, the Karawaks. Watercolours show the red coral pipes with bright blue pools and yellow vegetation among the arid scrub. So solitary, so brilliant , so brilliant in colour, the basis for my later use of colour. It is internalised with me. All my later works start on this blue-green colourite, incomparably my own.

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