The long story

My road to becoming a collage maker passed first by many years of being creative with my 2 main hobbies: music and photography. As a guitar player and lead singer I played in a few smaller rock bands in my late teens and twenties, but became a dj and singer-songwriter in my thirties. Music alone though seemed not enough for me and after graduating as an engineer I also started analog photography evening classes.

After a long learning period and experimenting with many types of analog cameras I made the switch to digital photography around 2005 and also learned to use Adobe Photoshop. This new skill brought me to graphic design and thinking in layers. It must be around those times that some first ideas for collages came to my mind.

I experimented with digital and also analog collages for a while, but stopped almost all my creative hobbies for a few years to make a career switch to webdesigner and multimedia developer. I even sold many of my guitars, amps and vintage cameras to be able to study again and pay my bills. Because my own musical career wasn’t really working out I decided to focus later on photographing my favourite musicians live on stage.

Between 2007 and 2016 I visited a crazy amount of concerts and festivals in Belgium with my Pentax and later with my Nikon camera. But after 8 busy years I was starting to have physical pains from carrying cameras so much and from spending too many hours behind my laptop to edit the colours and contrasts in the resulting photos. I realised it was time for a big change and the fact that concert venues wouldn’t allow cameras with separate objectives anymore for non-press photographers probably speeded up my decision.

After my music photo exhibition in November 2016, my main visual creative output became collage making. Since then I have made hundreds of collages and had 3 collage exhibitions in the European cultural melting pot of Brussels, where I live and work. I get inspiration from some famous collage artists like Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Satchmo (Louis Armstrong) and Karl Waldman but also from more recent collage artists like Eugenia Loli and Hollie Chastain.

Expos

Coming up

• No expo planned in 2024 yet

Past

• Circular Times – collage expo i.s.m. Annemie Maes – Raad VGC, Lombardstraat 61-67 1000 Brussels, April 22 – May 25 2022
• Rue DANS art – collage (etalage) expo i.s.m. Annemie Maes – Raad VGC, Lombardstraat 61-67 1000 Brussels, April 22 – July 11 2021
• We Art XL: collage prints on windows during parcours d’artistes Ixelles– Brussels, September 2020
• De/con/structions: collages expo – GC Elzenhof, Brussels, October 2018
• Get into my Cloud: Photos and poetry expo at home – Brussels, March 2017
• Rhythms and Rhymes (2008-2015): Concert photos expo – DOP Platform Hypermobiel, Borgerhout – November 2016
• Life is a Journey: Travel photo expo with Sven Ceustermans, Tessenderlo – 2015
• One evening, one night and one morning in Sarajevo : Artification, documentary photo expo – De Kleine Hedonist, Antwerp – 2011
• MPTNSS: Artification, documentary photo expo on street art – Vibeshouse, Antwerp – 2010
• Big Fish: Skateboards installation, FrappantXpo – Timmermans-Opsomer Museum, Lier – 2010
• Music-Shoot – Centrum voor Beeldexpressie: Concert photo expo’s in Kavka Antwerp, Muziekcentrum Track Kortrijk, Minnemeers Ghent, Café Café Hasselt, Récyclart Brussels – 2009
• Some…: Photography expo – Corbie Hotel, Mol – 2003