“Uh ..well actually I’d like to interview you.” I try to negotiate without blinking an eye. He looks at me in surprise “Oh of course!” A few hours later I drop by his friend’s restaurant in the centre of Amsterdam, where I come eye to eye with his creations of wonderful women.

Starting off with a pencil when he was a little kid, his repertoire now includes experimenting with all kinds of techniques, applying them on many different materials. “I’m self taught so I’ve experimented a lot. You do need a basic knowledge of the materials, for example acrylic paint dries really fast, but not fast enough for me. Usually I paint on three canvasses at the same time, like you finish the basic layer on one and then you go on to the other one, it’s sort of like an assembly line. I often go to exhibitions to see what’s out there and to get inspired.”

He moved to Istanbul for an eight month long internship at the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art (IKSV). It was here that he discovered his own way to build bridges between cultures. “I love Istanbul because it’s the bridge between Asia and Europe. There’s a lot of difference in the Eastern and Western cultures; religiously, geographically, but mainly it’s cultural. The language we all speak is music and art. These are unspoken words spoken everywhere.” After returning to Holland he put this into practice and used art to express his stories and reach people from different backgrounds.

Frank uses his personal life and experiences abroad as sources of inspiration. A crucial moment was when his now ex-girlfriend broke up with him after he hadn’t painted for a year.

“That was kind of a sign to me, it inspired me to start again. You can focus on the negative side of life, but you can also turn it into something positive. I thought lets put all this energy into something else. I started painting furiously, made a portfolio, went to a lot of galleries and one of them picked me up immediately. That got the ball rolling and the rest is history.”