I Chose a Life Built Around the Gap

I recently finished a course of study in e-earning and adult education at the age of 57. One of the assignments asked me to reflect on my own education and training. I approached it seriously and probably a little too academically, but while writing it, another and far more personal question kept returning.

How did I get here?

When I try to understand why I got into art, into film, into animation, and later so insistently into the technological side of all of it, I cannot point to one single revelation, one clean childhood epiphany, one sacred origin story that explains everything. My life does not seem to work that way. What I can say is that certain things appeared early and then never really left me. They changed shape, they attached themselves to different tools, they grew more complex, more professional, more costly, more exhausting, and perhaps also more meaningful, but at their core they remained strangely consistent. Looking back, I do not think I chose a profession in any narrow sense. I think I chose a certain kind of life, one built around the distance between what I can imagine and what I can actually make, and around the stubborn refusal to walk away from that distance.

I did not grow up in a family that constantly went to the theatre, the cinema, or museums. We lived in a rural area, practically in the woods, and our childhood was shaped far more by the forest, by dogs, by improvised adventures, by being outside and inventing worlds for ourselves, than by any cultivated cultural routine. My parents were not people who lived through cultural events. They were at home in a quieter, more inward way, and in some sense so were we. That was our world. Which is exactly why one trip to the cinema left such a strong impression on me. It was not even a grand cinema in the urban sense, but one of those cultural centres that existed in small Belgian towns, and somehow we ended up there watching Snow White. What stayed with me was not merely that I liked the film. What stayed with me was that extraordinary experience of sitting in the dark for more than an hour and giving complete attention to something larger than life, something unfolding with total intention. And even more than that, what impressed me was that the world I already knew so well, the forest, the place where I had played, hidden, wandered, and invented my own stories, could return to me transformed by somebody else’s imagination.

That mattered. Not because I suddenly decided that I wanted to become an artist, certainly not, but because from that point on the world was no longer only a place I moved through. It had acquired a second layer. A hollow tree in the woods was no longer just a place to hide in or to build some crude little camp around. It could suddenly suggest a whole world, a mood, a secret, a story far larger than itself. I do not want to exaggerate this into some dramatic conversion scene. It was more subtle than that. But something changed. I began to look at things not only as they were, but as they could be reimagined.

Drawing was the most natural response to that, although even here I do not believe in the mythology of talent the way people often like to tell it afterward. I have never really thought that I was dramatically more talented than other children. To this day I suspect that the bigger difference was simply that I did not stop. Most children draw. Then other things take over. Sports, friends, distractions, social life, the quiet pressure to do what everyone else is doing. In my case, drawing remained. It was not a performance and not a strategy for praise. I did not particularly seek recognition for it. It was something private, something I wanted to do for its own sake, not because it made me special, and not because it separated me from the other children. I still rode my bike, still got into trouble, still did all the idiotic things boys do. It did not turn me into a lonely little genius in a corner. It simply remained part of my life while other people let it fade.

And what I was already learning then, though without the language to name it, was something that would later define almost everything I did. There was always a gap between the image in my head and the thing I could put on paper. Even as a child I had very clear internal images, but what emerged on the page rarely matched them. Sometimes that disappointed me. Sometimes it came out wrong in an interesting way and I liked it for reasons I had not expected. But the important thing is that the gap itself did not discourage me. It became the terrain on which I worked. I also realized, perhaps earlier than I could articulate it, that this was one of the few spaces in life where I could decide for myself what was right. In most parts of childhood adults are constantly present, telling you how to do things, how to play, how to behave, how to improve, how to succeed. I never liked that very much. In drawing the judgement was mine. The question was not whether someone else approved. The question was whether the thing had moved closer to what I had seen inwardly.

At the same time, and this seems important to me now, I was never interested only in expression in some romantic sense. Very early on I was also fascinated by process, by method, by the trick through which an image comes into being. The technological side of my life did not begin later with computers, software, and digital tools. It began much earlier, in a much more primitive and revealing way. When I was about ten or eleven, long before digital images, scanners, email, or home printers, and in a world where even access to a photocopier was limited and remote, I came up with my own strange little system for multiplying images. I cut shapes out of cardboard and pasted them onto a cardboard backplate. Then I laid a sheet of paper over those raised shapes and rubbed wax crayons across the surface. What appeared was not exactly a copy, but a transformed repetition, an image that re emerged through a process, with a strange embossed quality that made it feel both reproduced and changed. I would never have called that technology then, of course, but looking back I can see that the impulse was already there. I was not satisfied only by making an image. I wanted to understand how a process could generate an image, how a method could carry it forward, how a mechanism could introduce a result that was both controlled and surprising. That fascination never really left me. It simply grew with me, from cardboard and wax crayons to cameras, darkrooms, animation, film, visual effects, virtual production, and everything else that later came to define my working life.

Photography was another step in that direction. It fascinated me because it seemed to offer a different bridge between imagination and reality, one less free than drawing but more bound to process, tools, and technical understanding. In those days photography was a form of delayed gratification that younger people today can hardly imagine. You took a picture and did not know what you truly had. There was no display to confirm it, no easy correction, no instant feedback. There was a gap between the moment you pressed the shutter and the moment you finally encountered the image. I learned to work in a darkroom at a relatively young age, and I found the whole thing both magical and limited. There was undeniable magic in the chemicals, the trays, the slow emergence of an image from a negative. At the same time, it was also a very material process, restricted by cost, by film, by paper, by the fact that every experiment consumed resources. Unlike drawing, which required little more than a pencil and paper, photography always reminded me that process has conditions. That mattered to me. I liked the craft, the apparatus, the knowledge involved. I liked that you had to understand something in order to make something happen. But I also felt that photography never gave me the same complete sense of authorship as drawing, because however much control I gained, I was still negotiating with something outside myself.

Still, even there, the deeper impulse was already visible. I was drawn not only to images but to the bridge itself, to the place where imagination has to pass through tools, materials, and systems in order to become visible. Looking back, I think that is one of the deepest roots of my later attraction to animation and film, but also to technology in the broader sense. I was never interested in technology as a fetish, and certainly not as a substitute for meaning. I was interested in it because it changed the conditions under which imagination could become real. It changed what could be made, how it could be made, how close one might get to the thing one had in one’s head. The machine, the process, the system, the workflow, all of that interested me because it was part of the battle between vision and execution.

Animation entered my life first through television, especially through the old Warner Brothers cartoons that in those days still appeared regularly. Television then had a very different rhythm. It was not endless, not omnipresent, not tailored to every niche at every hour. In Belgium, Wednesday afternoons were special because school finished early, and broadcasters would fill those hours with animation, opening what felt like some mysterious vault of old cartoons, some brilliant, some cheap, some wild and expressive, others flat and lifeless. I loved the chaos, the gags, the absurd violence, the sheer pleasure of it, but I was also noticing something else, long before I had the technical vocabulary. I could feel timing. I could feel rhythm, exaggeration, anticipation, the way movement itself could carry character and intention. Some animation had force and wit and life in it. Some did not. I could already sense the difference, even if I could not yet explain why.

That difference mattered because it showed me that drawing could become something else when it entered time. It could move, act, perform, collide, accelerate, pause, surprise. It could become structured in a new dimension. And yet, even then, I did not dare imagine that I myself could enter that world. The distance was too vast. I lived in a small country, in a small corner of it, and most of the animation I watched came from America, from Asia, sometimes from France. It did not feel like part of my reality. There was an ocean between what I was doing with my pencils and what I saw on the screen. What I recognize now, and what seems characteristic of me in retrospect, is that I never interpreted that ocean as a reason to quit. I simply understood that it was there.

That attitude became clearer when I changed schools at around twelve and entered what one might call a gymnasium, only to find myself extremely unhappy there. I became rebellious, my results were poor, and the whole environment felt wrong to me. Then, a few years later, I discovered that in Belgium there was such a thing as an art gymnasium, a school where one could follow the regular academic curriculum but with an enormous amount of art added on top. That changed everything. Suddenly I was in an environment where drawing and making things were taken seriously, where art was not treated as a childish hobby but as work, as craft, as discipline. The curriculum was punishingly full. We had all the normal subjects, but on top of that an immense amount of art, taught in a very classical and rigorous way. Perspective, still life, anatomy, portraiture, landscapes, charcoal, watercolour, oil paint, technique after technique, skill built from the ground up. I worked hard there and I was happy there, but even then I was not walking around with some fully formed dream of becoming an animator. I did not yet know where all of this would lead. I only knew that I was preparing myself for something, and that if I was ever going to survive in a creative life, I would need more than vague talent or enthusiasm.

That conviction came partly from what I could already see around me in the smaller and harsher corners of the art world. Not the glamorous version that people fantasize about, but the struggling version where people scrape by, where talent alone solves nothing, and where lack of knowledge blocks possibility at every turn. I saw people who clearly had something, but who lacked the training, the discipline, or the structure to turn that something into a sustainable practice. That left a strong impression on me. I think I understood fairly early that if I was going to choose this kind of life, I could not afford to be casual about it. I would have to be prepared, professional, perhaps even more professional than some of the people around me. I did not yet have elegant language for that thought, but the principle was already there.

So when animation finally appeared before me, not as a distant spectacle on television but as a course of study, as something one could actually learn, choose, and pursue in Belgium, it hit me with real force. I was stunned that such a thing could be studied at all, and even more stunned that it was available in my own little corner of the world. Until then animation had seemed exotic, almost unreachable, something that belonged elsewhere, to bigger industries, bigger countries, bigger systems. Suddenly it was there in front of me as a possibility. My reaction was not fear. It was shock, excitement, and an immediate sense that this might be it. Not certainty in the melodramatic sense, but recognition. All the fragments that had until then seemed separate suddenly belonged together. Drawing. Movement. Timing. Observation. Process. Technique. Craft. The urge to build things through systems. The urge to make images that did not simply sit still but unfolded over time. For the first time I could see a field in which all of these impulses met.

What is perhaps revealing is that I never thought, this is too big for me. I have never responded to large challenges that way. I respect scale, certainly. I respect complexity. But I have never believed that something being large automatically means it is beyond me. The question for me has always been how to approach it. Today I might say that if you want to eat an elephant, you do it one slice at a time. Back then I did not phrase it that way, but the instinct was already there. I did not see the ocean and decide that I was not allowed to cross it. I saw it and assumed that one would have to find a method.

If I had to say what has remained constant from then until now, it is not simply a love of images, and not even a love of storytelling in some sentimental sense. What has remained constant is the gap. At first it was the gap between what I imagined and what I was technically able to draw. Later it became the gap between vision and process, between image and movement, between concept and the available tools. Later still it became the gap between imagination and time, imagination and budget, imagination and the practical constraints of production, collaboration, compromise, and survival. As a young student I probably believed that education would make those gaps smaller. In reality some of them became even larger. The more one knows, the more one can imagine. The more ambitious the work becomes, the more brutally one confronts the limits of money, time, logistics, and all the other stubborn facts that stand between idea and execution. What changed was not the existence of the gap, but my relationship to it. I learned to live with it. More than that, I learned to embrace it without surrendering to it. I do not simply accept the gap as if nothing can be done. Nor do I treat it as a tragic impossibility. I try to close it one step at a time, and if I get one step closer, that already matters.

And this, I think, is also why technology remained so important to me. Not because I confuse tools with creativity, and not because I think machines can replace thought, taste, intention, or meaning. Quite the opposite. Technology matters because it is one of the ways in which imagination negotiates with reality. It is part of the bridge. Every tool, every process, every technical system changes what can be attempted, how precisely something can be shaped, what kind of gap can be narrowed and what new gap may open in its place. I have always felt at home in that territory where creativity and process meet, where vision has to survive contact with method. Perhaps because that was present in me absurdly early, in that child rubbing wax crayons over cardboard reliefs just to see whether an image could be repeated through a system. Long before I had software, I already had the instinct to invent a pipeline.

There is, however, one more constant that matters just as much as the gap, and that is meaning. I do not use that word in an inflated or overly solemn way. Meaning can take many forms. In one context it may simply mean that a commercial persuades someone to buy a product. In another it may mean that a feature film reveals something deeper about human beings. In another it may mean giving people delight, surprise, fear, release, wonder, or the strange satisfaction of being blown away for a while. In still another it may mean doing work that carries historical, emotional, or ethical weight, as in a virtual reality project about Holocaust survivors. For me the point is not that every project has to be monumental. The point is that the work is trying to do something. It is carrying something across, from one mind to another, through images, movement, sound, timing, design, craft, and all the technical machinery required to make those things exist.

So did I choose this life, or did I simply discover that I could not escape it. The truthful answer is that I chose it, but I chose it with a very clear sense that the alternative would have made me unhappy. I do not believe in destiny in any simplistic sense. I could have chosen something else. I know that, because life has shown me enough of the other world. There were periods when I had to do stupid jobs to survive, periods when I could not do what I really wanted, periods when comfort and stability stood on one side and the life I was trying to build stood on the other. I know what the safer path looks like. I know, too, that in many ways it might have been more comfortable. But I also know that I would not have been happy there. That does not mean this path has been easy. Far from it. There has been struggle, exhaustion, overwork, disappointment, underpayment, compromise, frustration, and the familiar creative pain of wanting more than circumstances permit. But even with all of that, this life has always felt more worth the sacrifice than a calmer life in which I would not be doing the work that matters to me.

Perhaps that is the clearest answer I can give. I got into art, into film, into animation, and into the technologies that surround them because I was never satisfied with simply consuming worlds. I wanted to understand how they were made, how they moved, how they were structured, how process could transform imagination into something shareable, and how meaning could travel through that transformation. I chose a life in which the gap never fully closes, in which every project is another attempt to narrow the distance between what is in the mind and what can exist in the world. It is not a life of certainty, and certainly not one of permanent comfort. But it is the life in which the struggle itself remains meaningful. And for me, that has always mattered more than comfort ever could.