Sign
March 01, 2020

I’m hesitant to send this picture into the world. I don’t think it’s very interesting or appealing to anyone, not even sure what it is to me, but I do care for it. It’s not about the circumstances in which it was taken. A sunday stroll like many others, in the dunes of Wassenaar. Almost too late in the afternoon, but we felt compelled to leave the house and our screens for at least a few hours before office life would take over again. So we took the car and drove to the beach. (Sometimes it’s the woods but frankly, this coastal area with its heath and dunes stretching along the entire country, feels like the only proper Dutch landscape, whereas the woods, well, they feel like a poor imitation of what the name suggests). In any case, rather ordinary circumstances, pleasant, but ordinary. It’s about the landscape itself, as unspectacular as it is. It’s an archetype of the landscape that I have known all my life. Not necessarily liked, but known. Trees and shrubs always a bit messy, brownish and barren on a sandy soil. A transitional area just inland, a landscape that has never properly made up its mind. Not very pretty really. But there is a path, of course, with a sign to indicate it’s a path. Because every bit of what we have, and it isn’t much, is made accessible. This particular blue sign has been around since forever, I remember it from my childhood, when I went for sunday walks with my dad. I always felt that its picture represented me and him. I like the different tones of green alongside the path, and how it meanders into the distance, mimicking the twisty branches of the trees.

Meijendel, near Wassenaar.