"To me the best thing about the still life is its freedom of subject matter as well as the abundance of form and parts. With a still life everything is possible. You can even paint a landscape or a nude into a still life. It offers the chance to create a world of your own with the colours and shapes that carry a special meaning for you... and you can pick out objects not just for their form, but for the associations and memories they bring, precious things. So you start off with an attic full of bottles and pitchers and stuff, but that soon narrows down to about ten or twelve attributes which keep you busy for years to come, and then you choose maybe three or four of these for your still life; endless combinations of these produce a new painting every time [...] And after much shifting and changing, and including that one object after all, after this when at last the arrangement is to where you can say 'Now let's go to work': then all those different things have turned into something which I am compelled to paint [...]".

Ben Snijders in "Kunst en Maker", 1989, Drents Museum