My artistic statement:
I sometimes get the question "Why do you paint Mickey Mouse & Batman?"
And my answer is this…
I do not work with neither Mickey Mouse, the Phantom, Batman or any of the other known cartoon characters, but with the meaning the comics had on me throughout my childhood. What kind of influence did this have on me as a child? What significance do they still have on me?
I caricature, parody and portray characters, stories and own memories from my own childhood. Toying and playing around with emotions that is still in me! Forgotten memories that emerge again!? The fantasies I used to play around with… is it still in me?
But perhaps most importantly - what remains of me, the original me, from that time. Am I still a child? Ore have I grown up?
Just think of how important this, the comics, has been to people! That even now, 50 years after his death, Walt Disney is perhaps the foremost symbol of American culture, and it would have been difficult to imagine a world without what he and others with him created.
“Good artists copy, Great artists steal”
It means you may not be the first to try something, but you did it so well that everyone thinks of you when they see that thing. Like Picasso, Liechtenstein, Monet, Van Gogh…they may have started out coping someone else, but in the end they completely stole it.