Setting the scene
It was already warm when Josje and I sat down on the terrace at Bagels & Juice on Strijp-S.
A wide street stretched out in front of us, with trees and a large pedestrian and cycling path running through its center. People moved in both directions: cyclists, people walking their dogs, everyone enjoying the morning sun, most wearing sunglasses.
It was around 24 degrees when we arrived. By the time we left, the temperature had climbed close to 30.
Josje ordered an espresso tonic. I had never heard of it.
A glass of tonic, ice, and a shot of espresso did not sound like an obvious combination. I ordered the same, because why not give it a try?
The first sip was different but refreshing. Bitter, sweet, and sharp at the same time. Two flavors that seemed as if they should compete, yet somehow worked together.
At the time, it was just an unusual drink. Later, it felt like a fitting start.
Much of our conversation would turn out to be about what happens when you begin with an intention, then leave enough room for something else to happen.
What she does
Josje is an Art & Culture teacher in secondary education and an illustrator.
Her students work with paint, paper, clay, construction, and other physical materials. Sometimes an assignment leans toward art. Sometimes it moves closer to craft or technology.
When you engineer something, you usually begin with a purpose. You know roughly what the result should do and work backwards from there.
Art begins differently.
Subjects such as language and mathematics have a visible progression. Letters become words. Basic calculations become equations and graphs. Each step prepares you for the next one.
In art, much of the complexity arrives at once.
Students work with color, shape, composition, technique, material, observation, and interpretation, while simultaneously figuring out what they want to make.
There is no perfectly smooth introduction. You cannot wait until you understand everything before starting.
At some point, you have to make a mark and see what happens.
That makes teaching art partly about technique, but also about attention: noticing what appears, responding to it, and learning when to let the process take you somewhere you did not expect.
What we talked about
Material has an opinion
Josje sometimes gives her students random prompts.
She has collections of words: objects, colors, emotions, people, fragments. A student might get binoculars, green, and an emotion.
These are not instructions but starting conditions. They do not define the outcome; they simply set something in motion.
The same prompt can lead to completely different work.
That raises a question that keeps returning in her teaching: how do you judge good art?
Technique is part of it. So is process.
But art is never only the execution of instructions.
Material participates.
Paint spreads in ways you did not plan. Paper absorbs more than expected. A brush leaves a mark you did not intend. A stain appears where nothing was supposed to be.
You can treat that as an error, or stay with it long enough to see what it becomes.
For Josje, that shift is essential. The material is not passive. It has an opinion.
It is less about controlling everything and more about staying in dialogue with what is happening.
This is also why she prefers analogue work. Digital tools can make things smooth, perfect, optimized, and controlled. Physical materials leave more room for friction and happy accidents.
More control does not always improve the work.
Good art needs skill, but it also needs openness. The artist brings the intention, while the material helps determine what happens next.
Great art is never made alone.
Ephemeral art
Then, almost fittingly, our conversation demonstrated the same idea.
A man walked past with his dog, recognized Josje, and stopped to say hello. He had recently been at a music festival and started talking about the performance he had seen there.
A random encounter added something neither of us had planned and shifted our conversation from visual art toward music.
But the underlying idea we were discussing remained the same.
A musician does not create a live performance alone. The room changes the sound. The audience changes the energy. The artist feels the response and adjusts.
Josje’s father had a phrase for this: vluchtige kunst. Ephemeral art. Art that exists fully for only one moment.
The artist contributes, but so do the audience, the acoustics, the building, and the atmosphere that forms in the room. A recording can preserve the sound, but never that exact combination of people, energy, and place.
The paper answers the painter. The audience answers the musician. And a guy walking his dog changed the direction of our conversation.
Sometimes reality gives the plan a small nudge.
Life quakes
We often assume our current direction will stay logical. We build routines, choose work, form ambitions, and sketch a future that feels stable from where we stand.
But what feels inevitable now can look completely different a few years later.
Josje called out what is called a life quake.
Like an earthquake, it shifts the ground beneath what we thought was solid. A relationship ends, someone dies, work loses meaning, health changes, or circumstances reshape how we see things.
Afterwards, the old plan may no longer fit.
It is tempting to frame every disruption as a gift, but that is too simple. Some experiences are simply difficult.
Still, eventually we have to work with what remains.
This is where it connects back to art.
Going with the flow sounds easy when nothing is at stake. It is simple to embrace accidents when they are just paint on paper.
Life is less gentle.
Sometimes it does not add a splash. It flips over the table.
We cannot always prevent that shift. But we have to respond. Not by pretending nothing changed, but by starting again from where we are.
Letting the city choose
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Josje what was next.
Berlin.
What she likes about the city is exactly what had been running through our conversation: its rough edges, its unpredictability, the feeling that something unexpected can happen.
She and her partner sometimes lean into that by turning people-watching into a game. They notice someone moving with purpose and let that person’s direction guide their own walk. For a while, a stranger’s route becomes theirs.
It sounds almost like stalking when described too literally, but that is not the point. They are not trying to learn anything private. They are simply letting someone else’s movement become a thread through the city.
It reminded me of John Wilson, who wanders through New York filming small, seemingly random everyday moments and gradually connects them into unexpected stories.
When I brought him up, Josje immediately recognized it.
Both approaches start with attention and let reality redirect the plan.
In Berlin, she does not arrive with a fixed route. A person crossing the street becomes a prompt. A turn becomes a decision. A stranger, unknowingly, briefly co-authors the afternoon.
The city becomes a collaborator.
Reflections
Control is a mode, not a virtue
My work often moves in the opposite direction.
In new product development, you start with uncertainty. You investigate the problem, test assumptions, build prototypes, learn what fails, and gradually narrow the possibilities until something works reliably.
Reducing uncertainty is the job.
But even there, creation is not linear. Every prototype reveals something you could not fully predict beforehand. The original idea is only the starting point.
That way of thinking can quietly become a default, applied everywhere.
In conversations, it can turn into interrogation.
In creative work, into optimization that flattens what was interesting.
In life, into treating everything as a project to optimize.
The skill is not choosing control or openness.
It is knowing when to narrow the possibilities, and when to stay open to what happens next.
Everything is temporary
Josje’s ideas about ephemeral art and life quakes point to the same truth: nothing stays unchanged forever.
That can be painful to accept. But knowing things are temporary can also make us notice them more closely.
I cannot control how long a moment lasts. I can control whether I am present enough to experience it while it is here.
I should look up more often. Not to make moments last, but to make sure I am actually there while they do.