Erik Pevernagie is a celebrated Belgian painter and philosophical author whose work delves into the profound relationship between individuals and their environment. His evocative art and writings explore the narratives of everyday life, inviting viewers and readers to find deeper meaning in the mundane. With exhibitions across Europe and thought-provoking books, he challenges perceptions and encourages a more mindful, introspective existence. His creative journey inspires others to see the extraordinary stories hidden in plain sight.
"We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. ['Disruption']"
"In the beginning was the word and the word was love and love was imagination. When love takes us through the sun-dappled garden of our imagination, no stalking horses can perturb the rainbow in our mind or fade out its bright colors reflecting in the blue sky of our memory. ['Alpha and Omega']"
"Emotion is 'recognition'. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. ['Those journeys of love']"
"Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. ['Absence of beauty was like hell']"
"When relationships lose their pitch through lack of interest and become stale or unbearable through enduring stealthy backbiting, the emotional house of cards is under attack. A painstaking reshuffle, however, may brand a new choice of life and create energy for positive thinking, whereas remaining bogged down in dispiriting situations and staying clogged up with immaterial hassle may only spawn forlorn deadlocks.. ['Mes cliques et mes claques']"
"Man may feel like a feeble and powerless pawn, at some moment in his life. This apprehension can come out of the blue, in the middle of the day, at the center of a public place, like a cerebral attack. Check mated by 'daily routine', he may feel trapped in a smothering set of circumstances and only a deconstruction of all impeding barriers can bring about a vital mental deliverance. ['Check and mate']"
"If we dare to dream, we must dare to wake up. When we come to rub our eyes wide open and face up to realness, we can clear our vision and curb a whirlwind of bewilderment that might break our mind apart, once fantasy wrangles with reality and our awareness denies the true colors of facts. ['Behind the frosted glass']"
"If we go down the rabbit hole of our unconsciousness and try to unravel the knotty points of our life story we may encounter a bunch of hidden niceties or emotional stowaways. Forgotten details in the windmill of our mind may daintily reveal, where things might have gone wrong. ['I wonder what went wrong.']"
"Emotion often outwits intelligence, while intuition renders life surprisingly fluent and enjoyable. ['Le ciel c'est l'autre']"
"By looking for the unexpected and discerning the surreptitious features in the scenery within us, we apprehend our personality, find out our identity and learn how to cultivate it. Taking care of our fingerprints will be an enduring endeavor. ['Looking for the unexpected']"
"If reshaping a life style boils down to pretending and dwindling into a world of make-believe, living may turn into a schizophrenic merry-go-round and the real self might be crunched and munched on, piece by piece. ['He did not know that she knew']"
"Woe betides anyone getting in the way of people that keep on muddying the waters, throwing up smoke screens and clouding issues, so as to conceal their dubious motivations. ['Could the milkman be the devil?']"
"There is nothing either ' good or bad ' but ' thinking ' makes it so. It is the "perception" that makes things what they are. Good and bad is in our mind. It is our mindset, our mental attitude that determines how we will interpret and respond to situations.Erik pevernagie - ['Is that all there is ?']"
"In a lifeworld, where we can be what we are, and not what people expect us to be, we can escape a blank and void existence, which is linked to wrecking ennui. Boredom often slips into revulsion and nausea, for not being able to find an identity and not succeeding in acquiring individuality with the quality of authenticity. ['Like a frozen image']"
"The day we decide to drop the flimsy makeshift scenarios in our cluttered mind and eschew the 'alleluias' of self-importance, life can become genuine, lucid and graceful, like a flow of wellness in the glow of a new morning. ['Words flew away like birds']"
"When perception, thoughtfulness and understanding do meet, we can fashion a range of viable expectations and craft a world of togetherness. ['Morning after']"
"Understanding may become "misunderstanding, if no commitment or no responsibilities are assumed, no specific objectives set, no definite expectations met and common values and interests no longer shared. Mutual understanding may then, against all odds, end up in heartache, confusion and bewilderment. ['Mutual understanding']"
"People who don't construe their life and don't frame their own tale, stay on the sidelines, remain only an act without a story and turn into an "empty box". Out-of-the-box thinking and inventiveness remains then merely wishfull thinking. ['Everybody his story']"
"Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ['The past was her best friend']"
"Life gives us a flair of awareness in the breeze of our daily journey and offers a free reign to explore what we are, to experience what we are not and to find out what we may become: a free ride until everything melts down into the indistinct and indefinite, while walking up to the ultimate gate of non-existence. ['Living on probation']"
"Jealousy appears to be a redoubtable pitfall for love, on the toll road of self-absorption and unshareability. When love has to remain cloistered and ostentatiously exclusionary, envy may show its pernicious power, cause wounding harms and unchain emotional twisters. ['Why has Shé got stars in the sky?']"
"Stolen moments create a feeling of enjoyment in our "intensive time awareness. The glow and the intensity of those instants can guide us throughout a whole lifetime. They can expose a second or a third dimension of the daily events and shed an expounding light on all the little details we encounter. ['Stolen moments']"
"Some people live disconnected, in a world of their own. Their wishful thinking represents their sole veracity. But when the mirror smashes the reflection of their delusion, it will not falter to talk back. ['The day the mirror was talking back']"
"Love has the power to create an inviting space in the lives of people. But if daily routine kills dreamy or passionate thoughts, the constraint of the room may become oppressive and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. [' Another empty room']"
"Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: 'I', 'me' and the 'others'. Since the "I entails what I want; the "me what others expect of me and the "others what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", "surroundings and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. ['I am on my own side, but I can listen ']"
"We are all the construction of a story and it is only at the end that we can assess the value of the plot. ['Everybody his story']"
"Silence is a 'contingent' phenomenon with positive or negative qualities. When it has to be assessed it needs to be 'contextualized' by exploring its background."
"When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ['Another empty room']"
"If the context is lost and merely bits and pieces remain from a scattered existence, only the connection of anchor points may reinstate a distorted mental balance in an upset life story. ['Lost the global story.']"
"The skeletons of the past must not hold back the dream of a new life, even though fear and regret, guilt and remorse may unsettle us during the effort to give our future a new home. ['Into a new life']"
"Silence can be breathing space and spawn release and wellness in a time of appalling inflation of words. But silence may be intolerably screaming, if it means absence of communication, deficiency in friendship and emotional deficit. ['A gap of silence']"
"Everybody wants what feels good; and if we wish a symphony of attention from a bunch of caring people and a harmony of happy sounds during our lifetime, we must not act like dark horses, saving up our emotions, but be bountiful to all significant others. ['Axelle Red ']"
"Eureka" can be an answer to a question we have never asked. It can be the articulation of a sudden and unforeseen idea or the expression of a magic moment that throws us into a new world. It acts like a radiant sunbeam that comes out of the blue and illuminates a dim past, opening a new, dynamic horizon. It may even be a trivial but lucky encounter with new friends, who let us be what we are in our imagination: original and undifferentiated. ['Waiting for Eureka']"
"When fiction has become reality, life may turn into a fairy tale or a firestorm. Tina, time has come to pull up one's socks and start relearning and reassessing living. ['Another empty room']"
"When we take the time to break free from the tyranny of Time and learn to listen to the sound of unspoken words, we discern the hot air behind the frenzy of the wheeling and dealing around. ['Wheeling and dealing']"
"When we are looking for the unexpected, we are not only looking for the unexpected in ourselves, but we are also curious about the unexpected in the behavior of the others. So as to know the others, we have got to learn how and where they differ from us. By understanding this, we are able to establish an uplifting link with otherness. ['Looking for the unexpected']"
"When we feel lost in time, with only shadows of the past living in our mind; when the moment, which "was", no longer "is and when only silence remains, loads of questions arise. We can cry a river or we may wonder: "What went wrong?"
"Rumours should be juicy and gossips must be mouth-watering, since they have to uplift and make people feel better. Tittle-tattle can have a swift ripple effect and when the ball is rolling very fast, it kick-starts a flood of moral destruction. "Schadenfreude can, then, be fully enjoyed. ['Juicy rumours']"
"We are what we remember. If we lose our memory, we lose our identity and our identity is the accumulation of our experiences. When we walk down the memory lane, it can be unconsciously, willingly, selectively, impetuously or sometimes grudgingly. By following our stream of consciousness we look for lost time and things past. Some reminiscences become anchor points that can take another scope with the wisdom of hindsight. ['Walking down the memory lane']"