JEROEN VAN DOOREN - Kees van Lankveld

Kees is the obsessive me, from stepping on a crunchy leaf, which is fun to do but can become obsessive when you feel the need to step on every crunchy leaf, to counting everything or ordering everything I see. Kees is there when I deal with a lot of anxiety, and the counting or doing something in an obsessive way relaxes me, although it can be frustrating as well. I came up with his character and the counted cars as a result of counting and organising M&Ms into colours before eating them.

Kees van Lankveld loves regularity and control, and has a dry sense of humour. He works as an accountant at a firm in Erp, where he is very appreciated by his colleagues for his punctuality and accuracy. Kees leads a normal social life, has friends, occasionally goes to the pub with colleagues and visits his parents regularly.

He engages in sports twice a week, and particularly enjoys swimming laps in the local pool. He collects stamps and stores and documents bits and pieces of his life, much like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Elijah Wood in the film Everything is Illuminated. Kees is a bit of an organised hoarder. He suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He is frustrated by it but it does help him in his job and there are some parts of the condition that he secretly likes. He loves to collect random data and organises this in spreadsheets.

In 2006, Kees decided to count cars. He determined the parameters beforehand and picked 249 different colours, different shades of five colours: red, orange, yellow, green and blue. To make the project manageable he chose to count the red shades on Mondays, the orange shades on Tuesday, the yellow shades on Wednesdays, the green shades on Thursdays and the blue shades on Fridays. In 2010 he started making different works showing the data he had collected from counting cars.

The name van Lankveld comes from my paternal grandmother’s maiden name.

Jeroen van Dooren