Well, I went to San Francisco and found that every cliché was true. But I also fell in love with the city of San Francisco and soon discovered that all you needed to do was walk two blocks to find the exact opposite of the clichés. Yes, I know a bunch of very loud Americans, but some of the most quiet, calm people I know are also Americans. I certainly met a number of superficial Americans, but the deepest people I know are also Americans. It is one of the many fascinating things of this country, it is a mix of opposites, a bag of differences, a load of extremes. Which makes this country extraordinarily interesting and inspiring -as well as tiresome....

Coming from Holland does create some challenges when you move to the US. I still catch myself frequently rolling my eyes and thinking "oh, you Americans..." I even regularly get all worked up because Americans can be so uptight. I catch myself regularly telling people (on the inside of my skull) to just chill. And I do get caught in situations where I can tell I have deeply shocked people without being able to think of what on earth I did wrong this time around...

I do love living in the USA. As much as I still love Holland, I was ready to leave that country. The Dutch cultural notion of "doe maar gewoon, dat is gek genoeg" (behave normally, that is crazy enough) was getting on my nerves. I have never been "normal" in the Dutch context, which is a nice position, for people leave you alone and you can do your own thing. But it was getting very annoying that the times when I felt I had something to say I was put in the corner of to-be-ignored people. One of the things I love about the American culture is that they have taken over the British concept of the eccentric; he/she may be crazy as a bat, but there is a space for him/her.

The relatively few moments I do miss my old homeland I find myself searching within my creativity. Interestingly enough I always look for a combination of the Dutch and the American, never just the Dutch. So I have made a series of portraits of presidents of the USA with whom I felt connected. Sometimes there was a Dutch connection too, like with president Roosevelt (the second one), whose name is Dutch, meaning "field of roses". President Van Buren had to be part of the series because he quite literally WAS Dutch, he grew up speaking Dutch! To amplify the Dutch connection (and in most instances to create that connection) I looked at a "typically Dutch" way of depicting things. Here I fell back on one of the Dutch clichés. Go to any tourist store in the Netherlands and you will find the white-and-blue ceramics of Delft Blue, or cheap imitations thereof. Started in the 17th century as a way to tap into the market for Chinese china, which was too rare and expensive to meet the demand, Delft Blauw has become the epitome of Dutch products. I don't think I know a single Dutch person who owns a piece of Delft Blue, and the original Delft Blue is way too expensive for most Dutch to even consider buying some. But there is no way of getting around it, it is quite literally everywhere a single tourist might show up. Hence my Delft Blue presidents. It felt appropriate for a Dutch-American project

I still have some things I would like to make in this series. I would actually love to make some china/ceramic objects, mixing the Dutch and the American. Here are some ideas.