Hans Knol ten Bensel is a writer, artist and photographer who is passionate about literature, journalism, art and creativity in all its forms.
As a writer, he has a keen interest in story writing, and will regularly report about everything around his other main passion, cars and the people who designed and own and drive them, on his website www.autoprova.be. He is also a keen automotive connoisseur and historian, gives lectures about the automotive history as well as future environmentally conscious mobility.
He also writes on art in Lifestyle Magazines and Blogs.
As an artist he makes ink and pencil drawings about various subjects, and has been throughout his life active in landscape painting in various media.
As a photographer, his main interest is people, street, car photography, as well as urban and landscape photography.
Beyond his writings and photography on cars and mobility, he finds that the scope of the modern man and woman extends vastly wider, and therefore created another platform in the shape of this website/magazine The Gentle Mind. Together with his wife Martine De Clercq he will write to you about Art, Literature, Culture and the finer Art of Living in all its aspects.
Modern man and woman are looking for the deeper meaning of Life through Culture, Literature and Art within a more conscious Lifestyle, incorporating more personal responsibility, humanity and deeper values.
Martine de Clercq has been teaching European literature in Brussels for 40 years, mainly focusing on the relationship between art and literature. This has become the story of her life.
Together with her students, she discovered the motive of the city: strolling through cities has become an ever-growing passion, an essential activity for her.
Traveling also gives her the necessary energy. The world is no stranger to her: she was born and raised in Africa, also studied in America and taught in Asia. She followed her parents in different places. Now she lives in Antwerp with her husband: the city of her family, where her grandchildren enchant her every day.
She wants to give shape to her commitment in Zonta, in ‘Flanders Literature’, in the ‘Orde vanden Prince’ and in the writing and editing of articles for magazines and books.