Vincent de Boer - Romania

"I have done some international train trips throughout Europe before, but I had never visited the countries of Romania and Bulgaria by train. When I travel alone, I notice that there is more space for things like reading and writing, more contemplation. Time is experienced in a different way and that can be very interesting.It was lovely to see the views passing by, hours and hours of fields and forests with an occasional mountain or village. I travel regularly but still every time it feels like a relief that not everything is such a Tetris game like in the Netherlands. One day I arrived in Brasov, Romania, and after exploring a bit in the old town, I went up the mountain for a short hike in the low evening sun. The mountain is on the outskirts of the city and it was great to see how the locals used the mountain, for short hikes, for running-tours, for exercise or just to sit in the sun gazing away. The tourists all seemed to 'stay down'.

After my journey through Romania, I traveled southwards to Bulgaria to visit NoPoint Atelier. I spent three days in this beautiful place and hung out with Miroslav, a friend I didn't know yet. From the start, things couldn't go wrong because right after I got off the Bucharest-Istanbul train halfway, Miro picked me up from the small train station and suggested going for a swim at a waterfall. I am always up for that so he had sensed that very well. We visited beautiful places in the area, had good food, drinks, made drawings together and finally worked on my silkscreen print.

My print was made completely analogue, without intervention of the computer. I worked directly on the film with brush and ink, in multiple layers. Quite an exciting challenge. My idea came from my sketchbook, which I used a lot on the train. You could say I created a kind of abstract representation of the frame through which I experienced the world for a week: the train window. As a kind of symbol for an opposition and a challenge, are you inside or 'outside' with your mind. And above all, also a symbol of the acceptance process I was going through, for days I saw all kinds of things and landscapes I couldn't be a part of, and before I knew it I was past it again. The sentence I have written in the lower right-hand corner is a derivation from The Alchemist, the book I read on the way, which at one point also deals with the theme, are you 'inside' your head or a book that you brought, or are you open to the 'outside', the surroundings and/or the journey as an object."