89 Am I an ‘Orientalist’?

People often ask me if it is through Bert Hogervorst and her Flying Hippo travel organisation that I travelled sketching through the Middle East and Morocco. They are surprised when they hear that from the age of 19 I’ve travelled and even lived and worked in the nearby Islamic world. Ever since as a child I was read from the Thousands and One Nights (with illustrations of Rie Kramer), I’ve had a fascination for the ‘East’. One could call me an ‘Orientalist’. However Orientalism and the Orientalist does have a patronizing and disparaging connotation. Nineteenth century British and French male travellers come to mind. They were lured on by perverse fantasies of alluring, sex-crazed women locked up in Harems. They would use the excuse of ‘study’ to scan the place for colonial purposes and they would undertake expeditions solely to establish ‘scientifically’ their own and their religion’s superiority over the indigenous Islamic and Jewish population. I don’t know if I fall under that definition of an ‘Orientalist’. I’m an elderly woman from a European country and a Lesbian to boot and I don’t have the tendency to ‘go native’. Maybe that could make me a sexist with neo-colonial tendencies and feelings of moral superiority. The only thing that I know for sure about myself is that I’ve always felt myself at home and safe in most of the Islamic countries I visited. Paradoxically I was also spurred on by an exiting sense of the dangerous unknown like so many travellers before me.

82 In search of the ‘Salamander’

The most important reason for visiting Vlissingen was to sketch the model of Michiel de Ruyter’s ship the ‘Salamander. De Ruyter commandeered ships of Cornelis Lampsins and war ships of the Admiralty, but only once he had stood on his very own decks. That was on the Salamander when he traded with Morocco and the Caribbean. I knew the MuZeeum (MuSeaum) had a model in its collection. So there I went. The front desk of the museum is manned by volunteers. They had heard about De Ruyter’s ship but it didn’t ring a bell that the museum should have a model. They were most helpful but further than a printout of the model from a general maritime site they didn’t come. I was stunned. They called the back office. There were the professionals, but everyone was out to lunch. If I could wait? Of course I could, I chatted a bit with the volunteers and took a tour of the museum. The museum is set up in three parts: the new building next to the Lampsins House and behind the Lampsins warehouses. It is a huge complex over three floors, a cellar and an attic. Between the Lampsins House and the warehouses were glass encaged galleries. Here I found among other gable stones a very big one representing a ship that looked like the Salamander except that it had sails two stories high instead of three and it was rigged out as a war ship with two rows of cannons. I decided to draw the stone as it was nicely detailed. One of the volunteers had an interesting comment. He said that the Salamander was only a small ship. Regular VOC vessels had up to 250 men on board, but the Salamander would only carry 50 men or so. Half way on my tour somebody came down from the offices to tell me that indeed the model was in the museum, but it was not on view. Later Gabrielle Baumann the director of the museum came to see me. I explained I wanted to draw the model for the purpose of using it in a graphic story about Dutch contacts with Iligh. She told me she couldn’t let me into the museum’s warehouse. I had to write a letter and the board would than take it in consideration. I did and I haven’t heard from her or anyone else since.

79 Michiel de Ruyter and the Church of Saint Jacob

I’ve read it many times: when somebody in history becomes something like a ‘saviour’ or ‘hero’, people will find ‘signs’ of the later greatness in earlier life. The same happened with Michiel de Ruyter. Even though quite a bit is known about his youth that didn’t prevent myths to be spun. A few had to do with the Great or Saint Jacob’s Church. It is said, he climbed the tower to better see the ships on Vlissingen’s roadstead and the North Sea beyond. When he came down he chose to come via the façade: as if the tower was the main mast of a ship. De Ruyter was baptized in the church and was married there, but he is interred in the ‘Nieuwe Kerk’ (New Church) in Amsterdam. After having made a drawing of the church tower the day before, I wanted to ‘do’ the interior. Like most old churches in the Netherlands this church became Protestant during the 80year liberation war with Spain. That meant that the church was stripped of all altars, statues, confession boxes and little sanctuaries. What was left was a rather naked, open space. The inside of churches like this one I find extremely difficult to draw. It is just too big and there is little to take hold of. The only focus point is the pulpit and that structure is usually an over ornate and rather pompous affair. I always admire the perfect acoustics those churches have. That’s why the Saint Jacobs church is also used for concerts nowadays, the churchwarden in charge of ‘events’ told me. The day I sat down to sketch, the ‘evangelical’ broadcasting corporation (EO) was preparing the space for a televised recording of public church singing: ‘Nederland Zingt’ (The Netherlands Sings). In the drawing the lads have just finished hanging the lights and putting up the recording system. While drawing the pulpit the musical instruments were tried out. I was invited to stay on for the rehearsal, but I declined and hastened from the place of worship to head for the nautical venues.

76 In search of Michiel de Ruyter

The first chapter of the Graphic Story about Iligh will be about the Michiel de Ruyter connection. Michiel de Ruyter was born in 1607 and died in 1676 during a sea battle against the French. He hailed from the town of Vlissingen on the island of Walcheren in the Province of Zeeland. Zeeland was in the 17th century an independent region of small but rich and powerful islands within the Dutch Republic of Seven Provinces. Michiel de Ruyter is an iconic hero of the seas. His sailors gave him the honorary title of ‘Bestevaer’ (grandfather). The latest biography about him by Ronald Prudhomme van Reine was called ‘De rechter hand van Nederland’ (The right hand of the Netherlands) and a movie about his exploits during the wars with England was titled ‘Admiral’. At primary school I learned the song ‘In een blauwgeruite kiel’ (In a blue tartan shirt) about him as a youth dreaming about going to sea while working on a ropewalk. Lately his heroic status has been questioned and to have an interest in him is considered dubious and ‘not done’. He is accused of facilitating the slave trade. The Dutch had taken over the cross-ocean trade from the Portuguese and made it more ‘efficient’ and thus more vicious and dehumanizing. As with all iconic figures a lot of myths were attached to him and he had become more like an institution than a human being. Time to get a ‘feel’ for this man and to make drawings ‘in situ’ for the graphic story. I took the train to Vlissingen. It was a beautiful sunny day when I set out to the railway station only to find out that the scheduled direct train to Vlissingen had been cancelled. Time enough to sit down and do some serious sketching of the monumental Amsterdam Central Station.

What happened in Taroudant

There are some cities in Morocco that took a while for me to find likable. Among them Agadir, Tiznit and Taroudant. To me they are still not cities to spent a lot of time in, but they did grow on me. And in each I have found something that I can do when I'm there. Taroudant of course is famous for its city wall of reddish clay. Indeed a very impressive piece of work. It is the reason some call it 'Little Marrakesh'. When I was there with Heleen Toet we stayed in a 'Riad' of which the boundary was made up by part of that wall. With Heleen we stayed often in exotic and often luxurious locations. We were also driven around in a private car with chauffeur. When we were in Taroudant Khalid the driver had time off. We took taxis instead. For lunch we went to a place Bert and I had been to before. The restaurant is upstairs and on street level is a coffee house. The place is run by father and son. After lunch when we were out in the street again Heleen discovered that she had her passport no longer on her. We went back inside the restaurant but didn't find the passport. Father and son then took over the search with Bertje. While they were discussing the possibilities and retracing the steps we had taken in Taroudant. Heleen and I sat down on chairs in front of the coffee house. Heleen wasn't particular worried or upset it seemed. I thought it better not to interfere. Across the street two girls were passing the time of day. I started to sketch them. Heleen was looking on. The search party decided that the passport must have been left behind in one of the taxis we had taken. The son said that if the taxi driver had found it he most likely would have brought it to the police post next to the central taxi station. Cynical as always it seemed far fetched to me. However Bert and Heleen went off to the police post. Indeed The passport was there waiting for Heleen. Although outwardly unmoved by the episode the sketch had taken on a special meaning for Heleen.

Gaining confidence

I watched a show on Belgian TV in which the Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang was asked if being able to play a piano concerto faultlessly is possible because of hard work or talent. He conceded that talent and inclination were of course prerequisite conditions. He flexed his fingers and said: 'I just practiced for three hours on the piano and my fingers feel really soft and nimble now.' He pinched his rather pudgy fingers tenderly. 'This feeling in my fingers gives me confidence. I can play anything now without any difficulty.' He went on to say that it was like digging for gold and finding a vein. The harder you dig, the deeper you can penetrate into the vein till a whole mountain of gold opens up for you. I know that this is the same for me. The work I did in the last couple of years as a Urban Sketcher under all circumstances and anywhere at all has made it able for me to feel confident. I know I can sustain a production of drawings that is enough to compose a graphic novel from. The only doubt I had was access. I didn't want to have to spent ten days scratching the surface not being able to get to any vein at all. On the plane to Agadir we discussed a plan B.

Just trying things out

After the 'cardiac event' and the graphic story I made out of the sketches I made when in ICU I felt I really wanted to do graphic stories again. But I didn't want to go back to the traditional ways of a template of frames and pen and paper. I didn't see how to do it from scratch on the computer. But did I really needed to start from scratch? Didn't I have oodles of sketches that I had made on hoof? Why not give them a platform too? I started some try outs. While recuperating from the heart attack I had made some sketches of the place where fate had struck. Around that time the subject of a meeting of the Achill Writers Group of which I was a member was 'The Visitor'. My colleague Dan MacDonald had written a poem about death as the visitor. I asked him if I could use his poem for a graphic story. He agreed. His poem is about him confronting death while I made a parallel story in pictures of death stalking me. I did have to rework the existing sketches to a great extend though and I had to make two additional drawings. In the meantime I was wondering what to do with the Morocco book that was ready to go to the book designer. The fact that it would be twice the size of the Syria book sort of put me off. Why not break the book up into different parts and making the parts into graphic stories? If I did that, did I have enough drawings?

From analogue to digital and back again

By the time I got into professional cartooning I already had a Mac, a flatbad scanner and knew how to use Quark Express for DTP. Life changed completely in the late nineties with the introduction of Adobe Photoshop and the Wacom tablet. As a cartoonist and illustrator working solely for clients I rarely did comics. If I was asked to make graphics for a manual I still did it in pen and paper. All the afterwork I did in Photoshop using an A3 Cintiq Wacom tablet. By the time I was ready for a career change hardly any of my work got printed. Everything was digital and increasingly 'made for' tablets and smartphones. I noticed that most of the artists in my acquaintance who made graphic stories still made them for the printing press. Although most of the work in creating the graphic story was done on the computer. Initially I did the same. When by 2013 I seriously got into Urban Sketching I reverted totally to pen and paper. By that time there was already excellent software available for making quick high quality sketches on an Ipad or any such tablet or even a smartphone. Maybe it was for sentimental reasons, or even financial reasons or just plain laziness that I went back to the sketch block. I don't know. Although in prioritizing my expenses an Ipad never featured large. In any case the sketches I had made in Syria were made into a proper book that was published in 2015. The beautiful lay-out had been done by a colleague that knew how to use Illustrator and Indesign something I never took the time to master. In 2015 I was also preparing to put the sketches I had made in Morocco into a book and I had already written 98% of the text. But something was nagging.

The Life of Alie Snoek

In the late eighties I approached the poet/writer/magazinist Sjuul Deckwitz with the request to 'do' something together. It resulted in the graphic novel 'Alie Snoek mijn leven' (The life of Alie Snoek). Originally it appeared page by page in the magazine of Dutch comic/actor/play-write Paul Haenen. Later it was collected into a book. Ali Snoek was the first project I did together with somebody else. Later I would work together with another cartoon artist but never with a poet/writer. Because Sjuul Deckwitz at the time had a very distinct and original style of writing, I left the initiative to her. She wrote the text and I would make it into a graphic story. She communicated with Paul Haenen about when the next deadline was, wrote a little story about something in the life of Alie Snoek and dropped it into my mailslot. We never communicated about either the graphics or the story. It turned out to be gas! I thought Sjuul's stories absolutely brilliant. And she liked my renditions. I never found it difficult to turn her text into images. After the first page (on view here The Death) I never kept to the literal story. I let the drawings tell a parallel story to the text. From the beginning I left the text intact and wrote it under the frames in full. No Balloons. No frames within the action frames. It worked! Of course it wasn't a totally new way of telling a graphic story but to me it was. However it was also the last graphic story I did. I got very much into the business of cartoon making working for clients and earning good money. I had nor the time or the inclination to continue with 'free work'. Until I went to Syria and started 'Urban Sketching'. But that is another story.