Not long after our conversation, Floor van het Nederend would actually get into the car. Off to France. But rain is forecasted and he prefers to pitch his tent dry. So he just leaves a day later.

Floor van het Nederend is an adventurer, but mainly on paper. You have probably come across his comic book-like drawings, characterized by grand landscapes and his comic character Malvin The Cat: on t-shirts, concert posters, album covers of Altin Gün (On) and Dawn Brothers (Alpine Gold), in various newspapers and graphic novels, including Hotel Dorado, a collaboration with Pepijn Lanen. This year, the illustrator provides Into The Great Wide Open with color and thick, black ink. His posters depict Vlieland as a layered cake: sky on forest on dune on sea, topped with the Red Gnome. Just a bit more exotic than we usually experience on the edge of autumn.

It was quite a challenge, according to Floor. "Most of the time, I draw tropical, almost extraterrestrial landscapes with dense vegetation. In the Netherlands, and especially on Vlieland, you actually have an expansive horizon. No rocks, a lot of sand, a lot of sky and a lot of water. An endless sea. I find that space and emptiness really cool."

He is used to searching far: in rainforests, deep valleys, and oases. For a recent exhibition, he drew inspiration, as he often does, from a cult film of the '70s: Vanishing Point, in which a race car driver drives through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to San Francisco.

And meanwhile, he prefers to stay at home. "I'm not someone who really loves to travel or likes to go to all sorts of unknown destinations. I actually enjoy reading about it or seeing it in a film and then drawing something about it myself. That’s a way to still go somewhere from your workroom - in your imagination."

Floor at work in his studio

"Sometimes people say you should never meet your biggest idol, because if that person turns out to be super unsympathetic, you’re no longer a fan." And sometimes I feel a bit like that with traveling. When I think of all those people standing in line at Mount Everest or going on a hike through the jungle - that would take away so much of the charm that I have in my mind about it. Do I really have to go there? Or do I just think: how far is it, how exhausting, what annoying people are here?"

In his depiction of American national parks, the idyll prevails. Humanity shines through absence. Only his anthropomorphic cat sometimes appears. Floor knows full well that reality is often different. "I think about it a lot," he says about mass tourism and the consequences of climate change, which increasingly damage the landscapes that are so vivid in his imagination. "Sometimes I want to express that kind of thing literally in my work, but without it being didactic or stating the obvious."

He once visited the Grand Canyon. "I thought: this landscape is really insane. It's so cool. But yeah, there are just twenty people around me with selfie sticks, you know?" Tourists are flown in back and forth by helicopters. It’s yet another reason why Floor prefers to leave humans out of his drawings: "Because I also think: people should just let it be. It’s beautiful like this. All those buses that go there ruin it. That's why I don't really have that travel itch. Of course, there are plenty of things that are worse for the climate than people traveling to the Grand Canyon, but it makes it very ugly."

It has more to do with (self)awareness than cynicism. That the river flows and patiently carved its cliffs over millions of years, that beauty exists is perhaps enough for Floor. He travels there from his drawing table. Even Malvin often stays home when Floor imagines landscapes: "If you place Malvin The Cat somewhere, it seems so innocent. It distracts." The world is beautiful, especially if we leave it a bit alone.

As part of Shifting Perspectives Floor literally tilted his worldview. He also designed for Into The Great Wide Open a Vlieland that has an upside down and where the starry sky is the focal point - a rare form of abstraction for him. A landscape he knows well, transformed into the unimaginable.