painting the boy - 1983
In the years that Drost studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, he laid the foundation for his later art works. In the accountability at his graduation, Drost quotes words from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa: "I shudder at the thought of how little I have remembered what my former life was like".
Drost recognizes that 'past life' in the image of 'the boy'. Everything seems to converge in this figure. He is not concerned with one specific boy, but with the universal fact that everything flows, everything changes, in other words that everything passes away.
In addition to the image of the boy, Drost sets the image of the sea, of infinity. Again and again he paints hundreds of small 'waves'. All the same, all different.