Some years ago, I discovered the magical art world of Flemish artist Nick Ervinck.
I subscribed to his newsletter and was inspired by his ongoing progress.
If you want to get a good sense of what drives Nick and what his artwork is all about, here is a great video:
Nick has a church (The Dutch word for church is “kerk”).
Nick’s church is branded “K.E.R.K.” standing for Kunsthalle ERvickK” and is located in the tiny village of Sint-Pieters-Kapelle, a township part of Middelkerke, a mall town at the Belgian North Sea coast. Last summer, I combined a bike ride with a visit to K.E.R.K. on a very hot 10 July 2022. The exhibition “SKIN WORKS” displayed recent work by Nick Ervinck.
I was impressed and inspired. I wanted to meet Nick one day, and if possible visit his studio. At the reception, there was a young student, and I asked whether the artist was present in the church. He was not, but she gave me a business card with his email address and phone number, suggesting that I would ask for a studio visit.
Here is the mail that I wrote to Nick:
Hello Nick,
I’ve been following you for a while and I’m a fan. Yesterday I visited K.E.R.K. (GNI-RI JUL2022 SKIN WORKS) and the friendly young woman at the entrance said it was possible to visit your studio.
I do a number of artistic experiments myself, and I recently hired Kurt Vanbelleghem to help me professionalize my practice. Besides the art, I work on a project “The Scaffold”, where I bring artists, entrepreneurs, and engineers together in residencies for corporate clients.
I would love to have a conversation with you, preferably in your studio, or else in K.E.R.K. or any other location of your choice.
Interested?
Here is Nick’s answer:
Hey peter,
Nice to hear from you.
It is not possible to receive each person individually.
I normally only open the studio for group visits.
But your email has caught my interest. What you are doing is of course not clear to me.
Bringing artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and companies together sounds like music to my ears.
I am someone who likes to work goal and result oriented. And many of these initiatives do not succeed in this.
I will be happy to receive you in my studio/atelier to exchange thoughts.
Fits for you possibly Tuesday evening August 9 or Wednesday evening August 10.
Or feel free to make some suggestions and I’ll check my agenda.
Artistic greetings
Nick
We settled for 9 August, also a very hot summer day.
There I stood in front of his studio, with no agenda, but with a quite detailed concept of what The Scaffold had to become.
I did not know what to expect. Maybe he would kick me out after ½ hour? No worries: I got a really warm welcome. Nick was very approachable, and as would show quickly, a real professional in all senses. There was a click: we spent 4 hours together.
Above the working desk was a huge library of more than a thousand artbooks.
Nick is also a big fan of Henry Moore, a British artist mainly known for his sculptures. Moore can be said to have caused a British sculptural renaissance. Nick’s Henry Moore book collection encompasses more than 300 books! The biggest private collection in the world: the only place in the world where you can find more is in the Henry Moore Foundation itself!
Nick also built his own virtual museum “MOUSEION” and his own “NIKIPEDIA” landing page:
The visit and the conversation were super inspiring for me. His work and attitude influence me in many ways:
His Focus
He is an artist entrepreneur and focuses exclusively on that
His Professionalism
Both as an artist and as an entrepreneur.
Everything exudes attention to detail and perfectionism in everything:
Archiving and documenting
High-quality printing, framing, book printing
Business cards
Website
Respect for own work
Cleanness and order in the studio
His Sharing
Links to books, his own manuals for art photography, bookbinding, framing, transport boxes, software, high-quality art print shops, etc, etc
His Erudition
He is very well-read, has a pluralistic view of things, and is able to express himself very well orally and in writing
I invited Nick to be part of the non-conformist tribes I am curating for The Scaffold learning experiences.
When leaving the studio, he left me with some of his own art books as a present, a poster of his Henry Moore cabinet show (see the above picture, where Nick Ervinck and Henry Moore are interwoven), and a recommendation for the book “On Being An Artist” by Michael Craig-Martin.
He must have read my mind, as the book proved to be another big inspiration for my practice (and the subject of my next blog post).
When I walked towards my car in the warm evening sun, I felt like coming out of a movie.
This is the thank you letter I sent:
Dear Nick
Do you recognize the feeling when you’ve been to a good movie, and you come out, and the world feels different? That’s the feeling I had yesterday when I came out of your studio and on my ride back home.
Thank you very much for the generosity of time (more than three hours!) and the quality of your input and feedback. Thanks also for the MOUSEION book, the poster, the flyers, and the book suggestions. The poster is now right in front of me.
Thank you also for the confidence in showing your management software, the guided tour in your studio, and sharing successful projects, but also projects that just didn’t make it.
I was one of the twenty lucky ones to be invited to an exclusive studio visit of Belgian and internationally renowned top-artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. She represented Belgium in the 55th Venice Biennale. The studio visit was organized by the Flemish Art Magazine HART.
Still from MO.CO interview video, Berlinde preparing with grace “to Zurbaran”, from 2015
“Born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1964, where she currently lives and works, Berlinde De Bruyckere was deeply influenced by the Flemish Renaissance painting. Drawing on the legacy of great European masters, religious iconography, as well as on ancient mythology and traditional culture, her work rests upon the dialectics experienced between images of current affairs and the breath of universal and timeless parables. By experimenting with malleable materials, like wax, fabric, or animal skin, Berlinde De Bruyckere built a unique body of work, simultaneously identifiable and moving, at times also unsettling, that translates into the flesh of sculptures the paradox of ‘sublime weakness’ posited by Lao-Tzu. Working both as a painter and a sculptor, her hybrid forms with human, animal, and plant features, bear an envelope, a diaphanous skin, or a bark under which quiver very dainty veins, a sap that ceaselessly flows and witnesses the hope contained in the miracle of each life.” (Quote from the MO.CO website)”
School corridor – Studio Berlinde De Bruycker – Picture by Petervan
Her studio is based in an old refurbished school building in the working-class neighborhood “Muide” in the port area in the north of the Belgian city of Ghent. This is also the area where she was raised: her father ran a butcher’s shop 100 meters from the school. Over the years, she and her husband transformed the classrooms into different art studios.
I managed my expectations for the visit upfront. Maybe at best, we would meet the artist during the welcome, and maybe the visit would only last one hour.
Welcome to Berlinde De Bruyckere studio – Picture by Petervan
Great was my surprise that Berlinde was there from start to finish, including during the lunch afterward. She was very approachable and hungry for questions about her work and her practice. During lunch, Berlinde was sitting in front of me, and I felt like we had an interesting conversation about her and my art practice.
The setting was quite exclusive: we could see work (in progress) that she was creating for her big upcoming exhibition in June 2022 in Montpellier, France.
Detail TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan
During the group conversations around the TRE ARCANGELI, there was a sentence/question that touched me:
WELK BEELD KAN JE TROOSTEN?
WHAT IMAGE CAN COMFORT YOU?
TRE ARCANGELI, 2022 – Berlinde De Bruyckere – Picture by Petervan
Also, the conversation about working with a team was full of insights that for sure are also applicable to corporate teams. In this particular case: how do you empathically communicate failure to the team, and decide as a group that the work done does not fit the concept and that we have to start from scratch again?
I will come back later in another post about the meaning or “concept”, about conceptual art, conceptual business, and conceptual curation.
Having this opportunity to be in direct and close contact with a professional artist is super inspiring, and it influences my own work and practice in the following ways:
Focus: no distractions, silence, solitude
Professionalism: time for reflection, and discipline of doing the work, every day
Attitude: the combination of integrity, modesty, subduedness, stillness, respect
The value of a concept
To go as far as one wants
Making a group that is forced together
Showing its scars and wounds
The blanket is a metaphor for our failing society
Still from MO.CO interview video
When you leave the show and you feel that the themes are tough, it’s not easy to find words that express what you, as a spectator, felt about the show.
But you should leave with a feeling of hope
I will come back in September on this feeling of hope, or rather our longing and yearning for hope and excitement.
From time to time, I do a freelance gig for nexxworks, the company co-founded by Peter Hinssen. I am always amazed with the positive, welcoming spirit of the team.
This is a fresh, ambitious company, specialised in inspiring and connecting their customers about the Day After Tomorrow. Inspiring with examples of exponential change, immersing people in front-seat experiences with top innovators around the world, all while guiding and facilitating the questions that can activate this ambition into action.
And now they have eight (8!) open positions with quite attractive packages, including flexibility to work from home, interesting fringe benefits such as an electric company car, a sharing mobility solution, (e-)bike, laptop, budget for a smartphone, international phone subscription, insurance packages, meal vouchers, etc.
If you are looking for a great job at one of the coolest companies in Belgium, this may be your chance. They call the world their home. If I was not retired, I would not hesitate a minute.
The nexxworks’ office building is in the middle of the student district of Ghent (Overpoort/St Pietersplein), close to sport, shops, public transport, lunch spots, … The completely refurbished iconic building was designed in 1930 by architect Fernand Brunfaut (°1886-†1972) for the editorial HQ of the newspaper “Vooruit”. Cool office space, kitchenette, meeting places, there is even a video studio for A/V productions.
Have also a look inside:
Some great team values as well:
Witty
Go-getting
Open-minded
Challenging
Positive
Eight vacancies. Maybe one of them is your nexx work. At nexxworks.
There were some interesting posts the last couple of weeks; all indicating that there is something fundamentally wrong with how organisations measure people’s performance.
Petervan artwork – detail of 2016 painting on performing
Acryl on Canvas
Céline Schillinger shared Influencers are not influencers anymore, highlighting that the number of followers is not an adequate measure for influence anymore (has never been),
And of course Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award winner Nilofer Merchant on why the metric matters.
I could add numerous examples of other organisations I met where the people are merely serving the system, not the company or its customers anymore.
Whether it is lean, daily standups, filling the boxes of an archaic ERP system, personal improvement programs, re-orientation processes, competencies management, performance appraisals, or innovation ideations, acceleration and incubation programs.
Niels Pflaeging used to have a slide he called “the bullshit slide”:
Take a step back and you will see that people act consciously and intelligently (overall), to other things than the change itself. They may resist loss of status and power – which is quite intelligent. They may resist injustice, stupidity and being changed. Which is also intelligent. The change may also cause need for learning that is not properly addressed. And these are the things that we have to deal with in change: power structures, status, injustice, consequence, our own stupidity, top-down command-and-control, and learning.
In other words, people don’t resist change, they resist bullshit.
As Niels’ slide shows, the bullshit is omni-present and something structural that needs to be fixed. Only structural change will change the behaviour and culture in your company, all the rest is tactical and innovation theater.
People have good antennas for this; they all feel deeply that they have become self-made self-imposed inmates of the golden cage, forced more than half of their working time doing the wrong thing: filling the forms, the quarterly updates, pushing up and watering down information and ideas upwards the hierarchy and doing nothing else but complying with the organisations’ processes. We are getting audited you know! It’s the process, stupid!
They all share that disjoint between one’s personal expectations of success and impact and corporate or even individual metrics.
I recently had a catch-up call with a friend in the Bay Area, and she was worried she’d become too conservative, she was staying too long with one company (18 months now, 2 years in a job seems to be a career in Silicon Valley…), and worrying all the time whether she was making the most significant impact.
We seem to have been brainwashed that our happiness, fulfilment or whatever you want to call this nirvana state is all about “realising your full potential”, some decades ago the mantra of one of the big tech companies.
I think this is exhausting. You will never reach your full potential and you will always be out for the next big thing. It will never stop. You will never be satisfied.
IMO, maximum impact is the wrong metric. We have to get rid of (comparative) scores in general: they are not real anyway – always ready to trick or comply with the system – and they are always about ticking the boxes about past performance. They don’t add value, at best the measure past value.
We need something that measures our individual progress – individual as opposed to comparing with others. Measuring our progress in building new, future capabilities. Measuring future value potential. Am I better at this than last month? Have I learned something new this week? Etc.
Scores are after the fact. They are confabulating. They are past-performance indicators.
Petervan artwork – Left overs of tape cutting – Feb 2017
We need some future capabilities indicators, showing our own individual continuous learning and cultivation of new skills. Our capacity to making-the-right-cut for the future.
Haydn Shaughnessy once coined the term KCI – Key Capability Indicators. I liked that a lot. At that time, the term was in the context of organisational innovation indicators. I wonder what individual learning indicators would look like.
What touched me was that Madame Butterfly was played by a puppet, directed by three puppet players (visible in black). The effect is mystical. Check out the end of this video (comments in Dutch, but that should not spoil the experience).
Opera Madame Butterfly - De Munt - As from 31 Jan 2017
It made me think about a passage in David Byrne’s wonderful book “How music works” (Amazon Affiliates link). I am reading it in the context of my performance for Petervan Productions.
At a certain moment, David Byrne describes how his thinking about a show – a performance – was influenced by traditional Japanese theater forms such as Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku.
Example of Japanese Kabuki theatre
“The tour eventually took us to Japan, where I went to see their traditional theater forms: Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku. These were, compared to Western theater, highly stylized; presentational is the word that is sometimes used, as opposed to the pseudo-naturalistic theater we in the west are more used to.”
“The character had in effect been so fragmented that the words they spoke didn’t come from close to or even behind that puppet. You had to reassemble the character in your head.”
“As in Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and “unnatural.” It began to sink in that this kind of “presentational” theater had more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance than traditional Western theater.”
“There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” To further complicate matters, I decided to make the show completely transparent. I would show how everything was done and how it had been put together.”
Check out the video footage of the resulting “Stop making sense” Tour. The show starts with a heavenly version of the song “Heaven” on an empty stage. At minute 2:30 you will see the first elements of the stage being rolled in.
The whole show is super enjoyable, and if you want to know what “playing tight” means, check this awesome version of “Breaking down the house”, which does exactly what you would expect.
Sometimes I think I have to stop trying to “make sense”. Better would be to “make meaning”.
All these reflections are related to my upcoming performance “Tin Drum is Back” (subtitle: “what is/what could be”): the performance design is evolving well, with detailed script being written as we speak.
Part of the story is looking back into ones youth (5-10 years old), look at what was forbidden then: for some people that is an area of talent they have neglected to develop. In my case, it was a tin drum I got when I was 6 years old, and the story of rhythms in my life and in my work. As the script develops, the narrative arc seems to be about evolving archetypes and levels of maturity.
Scripting is not “only” the storyline, but also the staging, transition, props, lighting, etc… And all visuals, sounds, and word are self-composed, self-created. Should be ready around March, although I may pick up some delay.
It starts feeling like theatre by an amateur 😉 So, performing “tight”, in some theatrical form, with costumes, masks, props, and stage being build-up as the show moves along, is certainly inspirational.
I see “Tin Drum…” as a teaser for a bigger story on multi-media corporate narratives, where – who knows – I create commissioned performances on less tangible topics (less tangible than “what problem are you trying to solve?”). I indeed think that a lot of the work I am preparing is steering away from the problem-solving orientation, and give more room to the creative orientation of “what do I want?”
What do you think? BS? Did I smoke too much ? 😉 Please don’t hesitate to share resources and serendipities that this post may generate.
My daughter is 10. She is a constant source of inspiration for me. She has a talent for writing but she does not know yet. When we had our first snow some weeks ago, she wrote the following (in Dutch), followed by a bad translation by myself. Enjoy.
Petervan Studios 