At the beginning of the sixties, at nursery school with the nuns, the sister said to me when I was a bad boy: ”So, you'll just sit there in that corner for a while, be quiet and draw”. This happened on a regular basis. From the corners of my eyes I could see other kids playing on the field outside. They ran and played football. I heard them through the windowpanes: screaming and laughing. I couldn't do that. No: I was punished.

Don't get me wrong. The sister was right and I never felt a victim. I deserved the punishment for what I had done, every time. Perhaps, even, she was too kind to me. I did bad things to my schoolmates. Only, after I became forty, when I started to paint and started liking it, I thought sometimes:”Oh shit Frans, why didn't you start earlier?”And then this memory comes back.

I bought a few cubes of paint (watercolours were the cheapest),three pencils and some paper and I started. I had to do something, because I was hit by a car and I was walking on crutches, I couldn't work for the next nine months. What to do?

So I started. I looked at the colours of Crete, the contrasts, the mountains. The light at sunrise and at sunset. I put on sunglasses (to get a better contrast) and I took them off (to see it better). Falling down and getting up. Without a master.

Things got worse. Looking at colours all the time. Sometimes I want to catch a special light, that waves over the Libyan Sea. Sometimes I see a sunset that I want to lock up in a shoebox and take home to paint, but I can't. It's impossible.

But I'm straying from the point.

For my paintings, I know very well I am not in the league of the famous, I hope that people will sense the Mediterranean, that they can dream they are in the Cretan mountains and that they can feel the wind of Crete coming to them.

I hope they can read something into in my paintings, something that there are no words for.

With thanks to Peter Dijkstra, who came with the idea to unite the translated mantinades and my watercolours, in this booklet.