BREAKING #17

The IJsselmeer

Nicole Ex

Column

January 2020

Nicole Ex

is editor-in-chief, writer and art historian. After years of working in the field of art and magazine publishing, including as editor of the Dutch cultural magazine Hollands Diep, Nicole Ex founded the See All This Art Magazine in 2015.

Column

January 2020

It was a windless sun-drenched day at the edge of the IJsselmeer with sheep on the dykes and black and white waders above the sparkling surface of the water. We had walked twenty kilometres and could already see the church tower of the Van Doniakerk in Makkum, when my travelling companion asked what I had in mind with this walk: ‘I want to bridge the void,’ I said.

In recent years, I had hardly had any contact with my friend who lay in the cemetery in the distance and whom I had met during my student days in Amsterdam. Now that she had eluded me, and I had just held her bereavement card in my hands, which showed that she had chosen to die, I wanted to be near her house, her vistas, her Harlingen and her grave for a few days.

There had been too much creativeness in her genes to be the notary she had graduated to. Self-chosen death is hopelessly unfathomable, but creative drive that finds no outlet, or resonance, can be a relentlessly self-destructive force, I know. I had wanted to introduce her to Claudy Jongstra, the artist with a studio not far from her. ‘But no,’ she said, ‘that will come sometime, not now.’

When I finally sit on her grave and pull the dry flowers from the succulents, I follow the letters of her name in hard stone. My righteous, stubborn Frisian Nynke with her unforgettable curls and beautiful long legs, with which she heatedly chased her bike because she always left home too late. ‘Tuinstra,’ I mocked her on arrival, ‘what on earth do you and I care about those few minutes!’

Nicole Ex

Nicole Ex writes a personal column every week. Subscribe to our art letter.