American artist William Crowder, New York, July 2012: When Conrad visited me in 2006, he passionately talked about Rinus Van de Velde over a few gin tonics, his favourite drink. ‘Rinus doesn’t get inspired,’ he told me, ‘he consciously and systematically looks for inspiration himself. Or for good images, as he likes to call them, whatever that means. When he walks the street, he fantasizes about other people’s apartments. He also has a thing for corners, hedges, passageways, gates etcetera: anything that promises something just out of sight, something new. Sometimes he jumps over fences and walls at night, just to discover what he doesn’t know yet. And of course he got chased by dogs, farmers, the police more than once. My guess is that he secretly wants to be everywhere at the same time, that he literally desires to find himself in everything he sees. Or to put it differently: he wants to be all the names in the history of mankind. So whenever he sees a blind spot, he jumps blindly into it.’ ‘Strange’, I answered. ‘I hardly ever saw him outside his studio or an opening, and I always thought him to be the opposite of adventurous.’ (2012) Courtesy Patrick Painter Inc.

Rinus Van de Velde