Sunday scribbles #24: The idea behind my Thriving Thirties exhibition.

Why is my first solo exhibition called 'Thriving Thirties'? For that I have to take you back and share a thing or two about my journey. For a couple of years I have been following the artist Callen Schaub on Instagram. From the moment I encountered his profile I was instantly captured by both the way he creates his paintings and the outcome. So I started following him and liking almost every post I saw. The process is magical if you ask me. After a while I was so mesmerized by his paintings that I wanted one for myself. Being selectively cautious with my money, I wasn't too keen on spending multiple thousands of euros to buy a piece of art. I'm in the phase of having bought a house with my fiancée last year, and building a life for the two of us. So you can understand that spending that kind of money on a painting wouldn't have been the best decision to make economically. There will come a moment in my life where this won't be a problem, but that's food for another day. After a while the engineer in me started to take the upper-hand and say: "If I'm not willing to afford a painting of him just yet, why not make one myself?". And so I did.

Luckily for me, Callen has already passed the phase where he didn't want people to copy his technique. Quite the opposite: he openly shares how he made his spin machine and invites people to go and make art themselves. The first part was creating a spin machine myself. I will be honest with you: I am not the best handyman there is. Whenever something isn't functioning as it should, I follow Bear Grylls his saying in this regard: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome, but for this I wanted it to be close to perfect, not just 'okay'. So I contacted my soon to be uncle in law. On his shed he has this sign, gifted by his children, saying: "If dad can't fix it, no one can". Of course I had to abuse this. I went up to him with a picture of the spin machine I wanted, and he was quick to reply: "No problem, give me a couple of hours." Yes yes, on forehand I asked him if he wanted to make something for me so I had brought the cycling bike which I already took apart. Indeed, when the afternoon came to an end, so did our finished product. The spin machine was alive.

In our newly bought house we already had a spare room. Because there will come a day that we aren't the only residents in the house, we bought a house with multiple rooms, four to be exact. One would be either a hobby or guest room, and the other ones you can probably make out what function they would have in the future. Even though we still have to renovate the rooms so they are both functional and aesthetically pleasing, I couldn't go around and cover them in paint. So I started to build my arena. Remember I said I'm not the best handyman? Well, for the craftsmen out there: yes, there are better ways to make an arena, but it does the trick.

Now both the spin machine and the arena were present, it was time to go buy one of the most important things: paint. At that point I didn't know that I would have to dilute the paint, that came after the first try. By now we have come a long way, but I am still in love with the first piece I created. When everything was finished, and I got home after buying my paint, it was more difficult than I imagined actually starting to create a painting. After watching Callen for years on Instagram, this had to be good. I so started to understand how artists feel when creating something. To overcome this sort of anxious feeling, I just started to use my newly bought paint straight away. People who have been following me and reading my past blogs, will already know that this is something that I have always applied when making something. Nike doesn't lie when they say we have to: "Just do it". I have noticed that the longer you wait to get in action, the harder it gets. So I have long been training myself in quickly overcoming that mental hurdle so I am not becoming my own worst enemy.

Almost a year later, I am organizing my first official solo exhibition to the public. I have done two home vernissages for friends and family, but my Thriving Thirties expo is the first external one. Besides my following of Callen, most of what I have just written has happened in the thirtieth year of my life. When you are 29 years old, you are living the thirtieth year of your life. Since I was born on the 30th of November, back in 1992, I have always had a special relationship to the number 30. I am not the birthday kind of kid who thinks it is the most special day of the year and everyone has to know about it, but in my own world that number has always been special. So, thirty years after my birth, I am celebrating my thirtieth birthday on the 30th of November. You can probably understand why I quickly came up with the idea to display thirty paintings on this specific day. Things just clicked and I immediately knew that I wanted to hold the opening of my exhibition on this day.

So we got the thirties part of the equation, but why is it called Thriving? Read my past blogs and you'll know why. No worries, I'm about to give you a brief summary. For long I have been a scientific rational kid. I studied industrial engineer in chemistry with a 2nd master in environmental management. These are very, not the say only, scientific studies. Alongside these studies I further developed my already rational thinking. Everything had to be efficient by being approached rather rational than emotional, something which wasn't always perceived well in arguments with past girlfriends. During recent years, and again, mainly the past thirtieth year of my life, I have been changing the way I think and the way I approach life. I go about it with both a more emphatical mindset, but also a stoical one. These things can actually go hand in hand. I have also been focused on the general way I think, and how I live my life. It is much more purpose driven than before. Instead of strolling through it on automatic pilot, I am now steering most of it in a direction of my choosing and with the pace I notice is feeling exciting. So apart from my creative path I have been pursuing, I also feel I am thriving personally on a much deeper level.

With my thriving thirties there is a main theme I want to share with all of you. It is that no matter what stage you are at in life, it is up to you to make your time a time of greatness. It's in all of us, so we shouldn't waste that. At this point for me, it's my thirties which are thriving. But that doesn't mean that if you are ten, twenty or seventy, that your years can't be some of magnificence. It is up to you to make something out of it, and your date of birth can't be an excuse of holding you back. Okay, at the age of sixty you probably won't be able to win the gymnastics at the Olympic games, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any realistic goals with the same magnitude. Why? Because you decide that magnitude. And that can come from just anything that makes you feel as if the present time, is your time thriving. I am now thriving in the creation of both my paintings and the exhibition. The feedback has been awesome thus far, and I am blown away by the appreciation by both the public and Instagram, but also friends and family. Hopefully my paintings will have the chance to inspire someone to go and take action in whatever field they have been dreaming of starting out. Because let's be honest: making the paintings I make, isn't the most difficult thing to do technically. It is centrally based around one the most important concept there is: just do it (and enjoy the process). Therefore I am ending this special post with my favorite quote by the author Frank Tibolt. I have already shared this in the past, and will keep on sharing this in the future, because I reckon this is one of the most important ones out there.

“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.”

P.S. If you want to know why I create modular art, go check out Sunday scribbles #23 .