Talk 4: The department that only took twenty

After physiotherapy, I went grape picking in France with a mostly Dutch crew. In the evenings, we talked about what we really wanted out of life. I said I wanted to become an artist. And people said, go and do it. If you want to be an artist, follow your heart. I felt the same.

I went back to Amsterdam and built a portfolio. I went to the Van Gogh Museum, where they ran a genuinely good atelier in those days, and took two week-long workshops with two different teachers. I brought everything I had, the new work and the old, and applied to the Department of Autonomous Arts at the art school in Utrecht.

Five hundred people applied. Twenty got in. I was one of them. It's still one of the happiest days of my life.

For two years, I immersed myself completely. Drawing, painting, sculpture, graphics, ceramics, photography, poetry, art consciousness, performance. I didn't need a diploma, so nothing stood between me and learning. I had no fear. I was simply a student, in the fullest sense of the word.

I never wanted to sell my work. I had this feeling that money would corrupt it. When the school eventually asked me to specialize, to choose painter, or sculptor, or graphic artist, I said no. Picasso never specialized either. He kept painting and sculpting and adding skills his whole life. I wanted to keep mine together too, to reach for whichever one I needed, whenever I needed it.

So I left in my third year, while I still had the option to stay. Then real life started. I became a waitress in the big hotels of Amsterdam, which turned out to be its own education, in people, in service, in reading a room. I'd already done work like that in my youth, at a special home restaurant for traders.

I never became a professional artist in the way people usually mean it. But I never stopped being one, either. The styling, the eye for space, the instinct for how a room should feel, all of it traces back to those two years, and to a twenty-year-old who refused to pick ju

st one thing.