‘You can live for ever in a paradise on earth, but you will never know how’

In this book, an empty publisher’s dummy (of Winkler Prins Culinary Encyclopaedia) I started drawing in 1995. I used a fountain pen to make it easier to take the book with me on trips and draw anytime anywhere. I made the drawings on the spreads and never on the back of a drawing, so the book was filled with 159 drawings, all covering two pages while the next two pages remained empty.
After finishing the last one in 2004, I began to colour these ink drawings one by one with crayons, a slow proces that took another sixteen years, untill the end of 2020.
The first part of the title comes from a small evangelical book. I added the second part because I realised ever making the perfect drawing is an illusion.

I don’t want to state too much about the drawings themselves. Mostly I had no preconceived idea, though sometimes an actual event muscled in.
The drawings drew themselves most of the time. By adding colour the drawings gained depth and spatiality.