And the dike goes on…

Land-water-agro visionary Wim Kol and I finished our second Dike Mysticism work this week. Or maybe I should say: we declared it finished for now. It has come out quite different from number 1. In hindsight, we were surprised about that, and we were thinking about how it had happened.

What was going on? First, let’s compare number 1 and number 2.

Here is number one:

And here’s number 2.

Same imaginary Kol building, different rendering. Actually we will be producing a few more in this series. Our next one will be probably be all primary colors. Inspired by the Dutch avant garde artist Theo van Doesburg (think 20’s of the last century). And in the one after that, I hope to implement a Warhol like form.

So how come they’re so different? We didn’t plan it that way. My explanation is interaction. As my great colleague Robert Dilts says:

When we paint, we start producing something first. You’ve got to get things started. In the case of number 2, there was an exhibition of works by Mark Brusse, here in the Nijmegen Art Museum. I became interested in how he combines paint and oil pastel crayons in his work. Adding that technique, or to put it a bit more modestly, adding oil pastel crayons, our work got a different character.

And that’s where I believe the field comes in. We enter into a field where there’s us, the work and the bigger field surrounding us (the city, the culture, our history, our longings, the art world and so on). And from that field, the next idea emerges and we add it to the work and the field changes again and the next idea comes, and so on.

And often in that new field we discover good things that we weren’t even looking for. That we didn’t even know existed. In this case, we discovered that we could very quickly and easily change colors in the smaller areas by simply adding a layer of oil pastel.

And I understand that in Manhattan people are struggling with the rising water. So maybe some day we’ll export some Dike Mysticism to them. But first we will expand the series.