During and just after his study at the Academy of fine arts Minerva in Groningen the Netherlands, Wokkel, as Marcel Kok calls himself, painted huge landscapes. His graduation project (1998) was a massive (5 x 9 m) painting of a forest. Since then their sizes have shrunk to more manageable proportions, but their impact has probably incerased. He travels to find his subjects. E.g. to the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Finland where he found landscapes where nature is overwhelming and almost violently present. Based on vivid memories, with help of photographs and sketches, and inspired by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Anselm Keifer and Peter Doig, he paints in his studio in Groningen. In the process the canvasses tend to become landscapes of paint itself.
More recently, human figures got a place in his works, and the viewer may well find often contraditory emotions in them: tenderness, love, hate, victory, defeat, lightness, darkness, fear of death and joy for life. Wokkel lets the paint do the talking.