The Beetle Was There First

Cabo Mondego Section in Amsterdam

Spanderswoud forest, near Hilversum

23 April 2026

Rik Lina and I form CAPA (Collective Automatic Painting Amsterdam), a partnership that a few years ago merged into the Portuguese group The Cabo Mondego Section of Portuguese Surrealism, led by Miguel de Carvalho. In April, Rik invited Miguel de Carvalho and the American artist David Coulter to work together. This led to four sessions. The first took place at my studio on 18 April, the second at Rik's studio, the third in the Spanderswoud forest and the fourth after a concert, on the night of 24 to 25 April.

Rik Lina, Miguel de Carvalho, David Coulter and I spent a day in the Spanderswoud forest. The session in the forest was a singular one. The weather was fine, spring had begun, birds were singing and the air smelled fresh among the trees. The four of us arrived at a clearing that could only be reached by ducking along narrow paths. Few people went there.

Rik, Miguel and I began at once, working with whatever was at hand. I had brought only a small bundle of sisal twine. Out of branches, leaves and moss, a composition slowly took shape. We barely spoke. Sometimes branches were bound together with sisal; sometimes short, cut lengths of twine became intricate details, small, yellow, curling lines on the green moss. All the while, David remained deep in tai chi. It was a new way of taking part and a new way of working together. The result was beautiful and unforced. When I returned two months later, the large forms on the forest floor were still there.

But there was a fifth maker in that clearing, and none of us had invited it.

A Scots pine had come down more than a year before and its bark had begun to lift. Underneath, a beetle had eaten its way through the soft wood, a small creature gnawing its slow path, and behind it left a script. Lines branched and forked and curled across the pale grain, hundreds of figures, none of them repeated. The beetle had drawn without knowing it drew, the way we try to draw without knowing, the way David moved his arms through the air without a plan. Its tunnels looked like the writing of a tribe nobody has met. They looked like petroglyphs scratched into a cave wall before language was written down.

We stood and read it, and could not read it. Something is written there. A name, an instruction, a warning. I keep coming back to one question I cannot answer: is it a blessing or a curse? We had already made our quiet thing out of moss and sisal that afternoon, and it stayed. But the beetle had finished its sentence long before we arrived, and it is still there in the bark, waiting to be spoken aloud by someone who knows how.