Three Weeks in San Diego: Painting Between Silence and Sound

It began not in America, but in Valkenburg.The streets were painted orange that summer - flags hanging from windows, shirts stretched across shoulders, the whole town roaring in celebration of the World Cup. My youngest brother’s bachelor party spilled into that same tide of music, beer, and football fever. Valkenburg was alive, loud, and unashamed.

Amid the chaos, I met her: Michele Martin. A real American in the middle of Limburg’s carnival of orange. We spoke, and I confessed my disappointment with her country. Conferences in cold cities, hotel lobbies that looked the same from Buffalo to Boston - my America had been fluorescent lights and PowerPoint slides.

Michele listened with patience. Then she smiled.“You’ve seen the wrong America,” she said. “Come to San Diego. I’ll show you another USA.”

It was an invitation, but it sounded like a dare. And without realizing it, I accepted.

The first time in San Diego

I arrived in San Diego carrying little more than curiosity. To give myself the freedom to explore, I bought a paspartout - a ticket that opened the doors of every museum in Balboa Park. For two weeks, I wandered alone, moving from gallery to gallery, drinking in art, science, history, and nature.

Balboa Park is no ordinary park. More than twenty museums line its gardens and boulevards, each one the size of an entire IKEA in Heerlen. One day I was inside a museum of natural history, staring at dinosaur bones; the next, in a photography gallery filled with faces of strangers from across the globe. America, I realized, believed in scale. It believed in showing everything at once, as if to say: nothing is impossible.

And then came the moment that stopped me cold.

The mirror in the Science Center

One afternoon, I stepped into the Fleet Science Center. It smelled of experiments: the faint tang of metal, plastic, and electricity. Children were running from exhibit to exhibit, pressing buttons, launching small rockets, watching balls roll down tracks.

And then I saw myself.

There, between displays of DNA and interactive screens, hung a life-size photograph of me. A white doctor’s coat, a direct gaze. Above it, the words: The doctor of the future.

The photo had been taken years earlier by my brother Jean. Somehow, it had crossed the ocean, been lifted from the internet, and now stood here - my face in a museum on the other side of the world.

Visitors glanced at me, then at the photograph, and back again. Some whispered. The director was called. For them, it was a curious coincidence. For me, it was a revelation.

Who was I, really? The doctor of the future - or something else entirely?

The Museum of the Living Artist

Days later, still shaken by that mirror, I wandered into another building: the San Diego Art Institute, the Museum of the Living Artist.

I did not plan to stay. I walked in, looked at the walls, and then found myself in conversation with the director. She asked where I was from, what I did. I told her: a clinical physicist in audiology. And then, almost shyly: I paint.

That word - paint - opened the door. She leaned forward, intrigued.“What kind of painting?”

I explained: large works, red, gold, earth tones. Canvases that were not canvases at all, but acoustic panels, absorbing sound as well as reflecting light. A bridge between art and science.

Her expression shifted. “You should exhibit here,” she said.

It sounded like fantasy. But as I left that day, the idea followed me like a shadow. And in the silence of my hotel room, I realized: this was only the beginning.

The return

Months later, I came back. This time, not as a visitor, but as an invited artist.

The museum gave me everything: space to work, freedom of time, even the keys and the alarm codes. Kerstin Roberts, the art director, lent me her old Volvo so I could haul paints across the city. Imagine it - a Dutch audiologist, self-taught painter, entrusted with the keys to an American museum.

For three weeks, I lived inside those walls.

Painting between silence and sound

The museum became my world. Morning light slipped through tall windows, dust catching in its beams. At night, the silence was so complete I could hear my own heartbeat as I layered red upon gold, earth upon ember.

In those three weeks, I created five monumental works, including one of my most powerful diptychs. Each brushstroke was a negotiation between who I had been and who I was becoming.

But silence is never without its dangers.

The false dawn

One morning, at six-thirty, I entered the code wrong. Once. Twice. Three times. The siren shattered the quiet, a metallic howl that echoed through the empty museum.

Within ten minutes, two police officers stormed in - hands near their belts, suspicion sharp.

“What are you doing here?”

My heart pounded. “I’m… the artist. The artist-in-residence. I am from Holland. A Dutch painter.”

Even to my ears, the words sounded absurd. But I showed them the canvases, the brushes, the letter of permission. Slowly, their suspicion melted. They nodded, half-smiling, and left me to my paints.

Later, I laughed. But in that moment, I understood: art is always a kind of trespass.

Conversations in color

Visitors came and went as I painted. Some asked questions, some stood silently.

One man, quiet and wise, reminded me of the trainer from Karate Kid. Another, an engineer, studied me with intensity before speaking.

“You must have both hemispheres highly developed,” he said. “Science on one side, creativity on the other. Few people can live in both worlds.”

His words stayed with me. For years, I had felt split: doctor in the clinic, painter in the studio. But here, in San Diego, I realized I was not divided. I was the bridge.

Through another lens

Chris Bozadzis joined me often. He photographed the process: my hands stained with red, the shimmer of gold leaf, the way light shifted across thick acrylic. He filmed the silence between movements, the breath of the museum itself.

His images carried an energy that my own memory could never hold. And then, years later, came the news: Chris had died, suddenly, far too young.

His absence turned those photographs into relics. Proof not only of what I created, but of how fleeting everything is. We paint, we film, we create - not for eternity, but because we are temporary.

The verdict

When the exhibition opened, I was exhausted. My body ached, my eyes burned from nights without sleep. Yet the gallery pulsed with life. Visitors paused in front of my works, whispered, pointed, lingered.

One artist, who had exhibited there for years, studied my diptych for a long time. Finally, he turned to me.

“This,” he said, “is a masterpiece.”

The word pierced me. Until then, I had been an audiologist who painted. In that moment, I understood: I was an artist.

What San Diego gave me

Looking back, San Diego was more than three weeks of painting. It was a journey, an initiation, a rewriting of who I thought I was.

It gave me palm trees and sunlight, the absurdity of police at dawn, and the shock of meeting my own photograph in a science museum. It gave me Chris’s photographs, now all the more precious because they are finite. It gave me a single word - masterpiece - that I had never dared to claim.

Above all, it gave me courage. The courage to stand at the bridge between silence and sound, red and gold, science and art, life and loss.

And whenever I remember those weeks, I see myself standing before my canvases, paint still wet on my hands, exhausted but smiling.

Knowing: this is who I am.

And so we wrote history.