Banging my head against the ceiling on the first floor doesn’t stop me from drinking a coffee in café Latei at Nieuwmarkt. I love it here, especially on rainy days, which is most days in the Netherlands. This small cosy café filled with a thousand colours warms me up.

Best brunch I've had in Amsterdam :) Love their bloody mary, and negroni.  Also great for dinner! It's owned and run by Australians so it's super laid back and beautifully designed.

The Amstel river is the main river of Amsterdam. Around 1200 they build a dam in the river and that was the birth of Amsterdam (or Amstelredamme as it was called back then). This dam is now situated under the Dam square, the central square of the city. If you bike from the old city center to the south along the banks of the Amstel, as I do every day on my way to my studio, the city opens up and gives way to a lot of space. If you follow the river it will take you out of town more quickly then you'd expect since it is surrounded by a green corridor that get's larger and greener as you exit the city. In less then half an hour bike trip from the old city you can find yourself in juicy green pastures between grazing cows and sheep. Only the airplanes heading in and out of Schiphol Airport will remind you that the city is near.

It's a very small museum in the Hermitage about art made by outsiders. It's also known as 'Art Brut', a name given to it in 1972 by French artist Jean Dubuffet. It simply means that it is art made by people that don't fit in the normal life structure that humans suppose to have. Which can mean that the art is made by people who are in jail, who are ill, have a mental dissability or another way of not fitting into the community. The exhibitions are quite small, so it takes you just around an hour. And the hermitage has a nice canal view.

At the Damrak on the daily journey between home and studio, my eye is continually drawn to the emblem that has functioned as a façade ornament on the corner of the Beurs van Berlage for more than a hundred years. In combination with the past function of the building - trade centre - and in relation to the present financial crisis, the timeless maxim gains extra significance: ‘Dis-pe-reert niet’ (‘Do not des-pair’).