Walk on the Wild Side

Lok Jansen is Jan and Tonny Jansen's son. It was abundantly clear to Lok that he was not going to pursue a career in shoes. Instead, he chose to study architecture. However he certainly sees a clear relationship between his own work and that of his father. Whereas Jan is constantly working on shoes, lasts, pattern, prototypes and using his eyes, hands and ideas, Lok focuses on drawing, painting and making collages. He recognizes that same urge to be in control and to form the end result with shapes, lines and other visual elements.

Despite the fact that father and son have chosen their own separate paths, those paths have frequently met. For instance, Lok designed the Jan Jansen shoe store on the Vijzelstraat, with the key colouristic focus being red – of course, Jan Jansen's favourite colour.

It was a bit of a challenge for Lok to take shoes designed by his father as a basise for a new artwork. It proved to be an interesting process. Lok expected the end result to be quite different. He had painted and made drawings of Jan's shoes before and figured the process was going to be similar. Yet, every time he sketched, the same image kept popping up in his head. This was Jan's muse and Lok's mother Tonny. The idea of a portrait of his mother grew and grew, but Lok decided he would put it on hold for a while. Every time he came back to his drawings for the ‘Jan Jansen Shoe Treasures’ project, he'd ask himself the same question over and over again: who was Jan Jansen designing for? Lok’s answer to that was: Woman in general, but in essence always for his eternally present girlfriend Tonny. It has always been the two together, both in work and in love.
 
Lok kept returning to the image of Tonny until he could no longer uphold his previous ideas. He had to embrace the truth of the fact that every time Lok Jansen looks at his father and thinks about why he does what he does so incredibly well, he thinks of his mother Tonny. When he looks at the Jan Jansen collection in general, he sees his parents as partners on a creative quest. Tonny will always be Jan's muse but she has also been co-designer of the widely varied oeuvre that spans so many decades. It was this that left Lok with no other choice than to honour this project with a portrait of Tonny - the critical eye, mother and muse.