| Hi, welcome to my page. Early 2004 I embarked on an "ARTSENSE" journey. As the word implies this jouney is all about the discovery of the sense, or the meaning, of visual arts. It consist in the following: 1. ARTSENSE acrylics series. First 40 are terminated. My program is to complete a series of 50 as soon as I can. 2. ARTSENSE books. I terminated a book titled "ARTSENSE" that is 308 pages long. Instead of adding always new chapters to that already long work I decided to continue my theoretical explorations further in a second book. You can follow the first draft of that work in my blogs. One day I tired of painting and of writing that's how I landed, absolutely unconsciently (no it's not a joke), into the 3rd leg of that long journey that now became so much longer longer... 3. Digital variations on my ARTSENSE acrylic paintings. I came to this idea to realize 12 variations of each of my ARTSENSE paintings... Those among you who have the fastest mathematical processors already calculated that this job is 50 paintings times 12 variations long, meaning that I embarked on a digital journey of some 600 works... Those digital variations are available in the form of series of 12 prints (one serie per painting = 50 different series). Each print is a Limited Edition of 01/25. ______________
Having been a first eye witness, during the seventies and beginning of the eighties, of the extreme misery where an artist can eventually land in our merchandization societies I decided not to let myself become the prey of the good will of the market. My personal approach has then been to make myself financially self-sufficient before to restart painting in 2000. Since my return to painting I spent a great deal of time painting and writing without ever being subjected to the agonies of having to sell something for covering the expenses of my family. This has assuredly given me peace of mind and total freedom to dwell where and when I wanted as well in painting as in writing. Writing has been a great experience enabling me to clarify my ideas. A condensation of those ideas is now available in a book titled ARTSENSE. I started, in March of 2003, to publish the first draft of my ideas in a blog called Crucial talk that has some regular readers. Later I reworked my posts into ARTSENSE. I plan to follow the same path in writing a suite to this first book that will be entittled "The Way Things Are". The material of this book is published as posts on Crucial Talk. ______________ My personal experience in painting dates from my childhood. Being a unique child painting has always been something of a refuge that was compensating in some way for a poor socialization. The result of Flemish immigration in Walloonia, for a Flemish child just after the second world war, was indeed drastically limiting his socialization with Walloon kids and it ensued thus that I socialized mostly with nature and with paint, with the paint material on the canvas instead of with other children. Paint allowed me to have unlimited conversations with myself. I had the exceptional chance to have the great WATKINE(1) as master in my teens. He taught me the love of nature and also the freedom to play with colors. By the time I attended university in Brussels, as young provincial, I was attracted by SOMVILLE(2) and attended some of his classes at the Boitsfort Academy of Arts, I did not expect that 12 years later I would befriend one of his colleagues TIMPER. The decade between SOMVILLE and TIMPER(3), both culturally Latins, has been the most influential in my life. It has been a kind of jumping out or perhaps of dropout of society's conventions, seeing with Castaneda's(4) Don Juan and learning with Krishnamurti(5) to appreciate the higher plane of harmony's perpetual change. JIPI (6), the Flemish Shaman, showed me how to let lines and colors go where they want free of interference from oneself's will. It was also a time of group painting with PIERROT, STEURS and others culminating with free expression at the "BRASSERIE"(7) that in the end pitifully fell in Walloon pessimism. This is when I quit the maelstrom and tried to immerse myself in Belgian society's decision making. But this proved to be too much for me and I left a few years later to land in China in 1986 where I stayed 17 years digesting the philosophical pleasures of insipidity, learning the taste of water and its natural movement down the slopes. During those years, oh irony, Xiaohong(8) taught me the roots of European classicism and helped me to appreciate technical rigor which I discovered "en masse" at the hands of Chinese painters. Today I appreciate a work well done technically but I believe that technique and art remain two different things. You need indeed to master the technique in which you express yourself in order not to be burdened by technical aspects but your technique does not automatically transform what you express into art. Without technique what you express seems unfinished and without intellectual content it is as if what you express were shallow. While in Belgium I followed the modernist movance and played in the styles of most of its schools. In China I earned an eyesight on the deafening technical skills of Chinese academic painters. I have to recognize that initially I had difficulties with traditional Chinese painting: Gongbi and Xieji. You need first to have been exposed to Chinese traditional philosophy to grasp what is going on in those paintings. Its practitioners are indeed literati artists who execute expressionistic and gestural strokes to render their vision of the essence of the subject they try to represent. I was interested in philosophy, I devoured the classics and started to be attracted by Xieji painting. Basically, in this approach the artist is a thinker who is up to date about Chinese philosophy. Understanding that reality is a process of change that is at work around all our universe, the artist makes the Tao, the way of life or the spirit of all things and living beings his subject of painting. His conscience and acceptance of how the process of change affects all things and beings let's him ultimately discover the Tao of the object of his painting. Xieyi painting aims to capture the Xi or energetic body underlying the Tao of the represented object. Gu Kaizhi an artist of the Jin Dynasty (c. 345-406) wrote that Xieji is "making the form show the spirit". It is often presented as the aphorism "painting in poetry and poetry in painting". Xieji is also often translated as "writing one's soul" but my preferred translation is "writing the meaning down". “Writing the meaning down” reflects indeed perfectly this idea of capturing the energetic body of the Tao of the represented object. Think about a mountain, the meaning of the mountain is to be found in the energetic body of its own Tao or spirit. What does that mean" Well it means that the artist has to get a feel, in the first degree image of the mountain that appears on his retina, of the way the mountain was formed, how the energy of Gaia molded its shape and being and where this movement is ultimately leading the shape of the mountain. In other words the painter, observing as a philosopher, tries to capture the past changes that shaped his subject in its present form and the present and future changes that are already affecting the present form of his subject. A Xieyi painting is finished in one setting capturing the spirit or the essence of the subject with masterful brush strokes and a good sense of balance in the composition. One can thus understand that a Xieji painting does not start with the act of painting, it starts with observation and painting can only start when the artist has interiorized the spirit of his subject. Some painters could observe a mountain for years before starting to paint. Wow so much for merchandization! In Xieji painting: The artist first observes his subject until he captures the essence of it's being, its spirit, in other words his Tao. Then the artist produces trial after trial of very fast representations of the spirit of his subject and he will stop painting after the trial that satisfies the exact representation of his vision of the spirit of his subject. Each trial is made of simple and bold strokes and terminated within a few minutes. Only the last trial is kept. It is the work of art. All other trials are no more than exercises and are destroyed. My personal approach toward painting and more generally toward visual arts is somehow the result of the many influences that I underwent along my life but more particularly it is the result of the gigantic shock between: - my understanding and practice of European modernism. - my discovery of Chinese philosophy and of Chinese visual arts. It took me all the years between 1986 and 2000 to digest that cultural shock. It's difficult to lay out in just a few words the impact of such an awakening trail. I had already experienced 2 earlier cultural shocks through immigration and than through education but nothing compares with the immersion of a young European in the daily Chinese realities for a period of 17 years. Along that uneven road, I have experienced the need to go back to my received ideas. Those were not satisfying me any longer. Two fields then absorbed my interest and all my time: - the formation of capitalism because modernity is ultimately nothing more than one stage of development along its history. - the build-up of culture and the formation of civilizations and more particularly the history of the Chinese civilization and the content and formation of its value system. After fifteen years of extensive reading my ideas were starting to come together and I felt the time had come for me to try my hands at painting again. I terminated some 10 gouaches in 2001 and then worked on 26 tapestry/rug designs. By that time Xiaohong and I decided to experience life in the US. The chaos wrought upon China by ultra fast industrialization and the opening of the country to greed had exacted a toll on our energies. We were tired and needed a change of air. Having lived some 35 years in Europe, then the next 17 years in China, the US seemed a natural choice. The prospect to complete a journey experiencing the life conditions and ways of doing and thinking, at the dawn of the 21st century in 3 of the most active areas on earth, is a very exciting one indeed. The quietude and vast open spaces in Wisconsin, where we sat foot, were definitely reinvigorating. A broadband connection kept us in touch with what was going on in Europe and China and then... I came in contact with blogging. I started to post in march of 2003 and gradually an idea built in my mind, why not use those posts as material to write something more substantial. Something had started to gestate that now is is available as a book. I spent all of 2004 writing and painting. The act of writing brings about much thinking and my painting underwent the influence of that thinking. The solitude that is imposed on you by the act of writing plunges you on the margins of society where the noise coming out of the world disintegrates and so you are left open, if you are free inside yourself, to always dig deeper inside your thoughts. That's a short but good summary, I think, of the dynamic I went through: solitude, quietude, thinking, writing and painting. At the end of this peregrination my vision about painting and the visual arts had morphed into some kind of a composite(9): nor modern in the sense of whatever Western modern school nor Chinese Xieyi nor Gongbi. Somehow I guess that I took something out of all those approaches, the elements that I fell would allow me to express the Tao of our days. ________________ (1) Watkyne: Jacques Vandewattyne: Walloon folk-art painter, author of a folk-art manifesto and activist of "simple and slow life" philosophy. (2) Roger Somville, Belgian contemporary painter, realist activist wanting to counter the influence of abstract art. He intended to put man at the center of his art. He struggled against the growing tendency of modern painting's loss of sense and its dehumanization. (3) Paul Timper, Walloon contemporary painter and potter. (4) Castaneda's works contain descriptions of paranormal experiences, several psychological techniques, Toltec magic rituals, shamanism and experiences with psychoactive drugs (e.g. Peyote). Although they started out with the premise of anthropology, his works became a mixture of fiction, religion, and philosophy. (5) Krishnamurti is regarded as one of the greatest religious teachers of all time. He did not expound any specific philosophy or religion, but spoke of the everyday matters that concern all human beings. He belonged to no religion, sect or country, nor did he subscribe to any school of political or ideological thought. Instead, he stated that these are the very factors that divide us from one another and bring about personal and social conflict and ultimately war. (6) Jipi, Jean-Paul Dhaenens, by the end of the sixties he was professor of painting at the Academy of Ghent then he left everything to live the live of a shaman. (7) "La Brasserie" a cultural and artistic center founded in Ellezelles/Belgium in 1980 that attracted all creatives personages living along the language-border from the North of France to well over Brussels. (8) Xiaohong Huo: Piano professor at "China National University of Nationalities" in Beijing till 1989. (9) "Composite materials" are combinations of materials from different classes that have properties different from or better than either of their parents“. in "History of Science and Technology", edited by Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. ______________ My philosophy, in short. The contact between opposites generates a burst of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution. From this we know that the life of all species and their members is given by the changes occuring in the following 3 dimensions: - The SKY or the influences of environments, from vicinity to infinity, on each specie and its members. - The EARTH or the influences of the hardware and software assigned to the members of each living specy. This is called the drama of reproduction of the specy through sex and of reproduction of the individuals through the satisfaction of their objective needs. - The SELF or the influences of the cultural and economic works of each specie upon itself, upon its members, upon other species and upon the environment. Seeing that cultural and economic works are nothing more than the specific forms and answers of one particular specie to the influences of the earth and the sky, that is very wise indeed. ____________ Harmony is something objective, it is what all great religions and philosophies strived to illustrate. Harmony can't be deranged. Whatever happens in the cosmos or in our human societies, or in our personal lives, harmony is always resulting. It's kind of a permanent balancing act of the whole. Disharmony is an impossibility, it is a creation of our egos. Our egos are driven by greed, want for possessions and glory. Those are the shapers of disharmony. As human creations, paintings are subjective renderings and in consequence they are not automatically harmonious. Our driven egos are, more often than not, playing tricks on us. In a painting of whatever style, and by extension in whatever artistic form, some objective rules of beauty apply to reach harmony. THE HARMONIZATION OF THE CREATOR's SUBJECTIVITY, freed of his greed and glory driven ego, WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principles of life at work throughout our cosmos, IS WHAT ART IS ALL ABOUT. In paintings, or for that matter in all art forms, content and technique are blend into form. What I mean here is that whatever technique is being used to express whatever content, the form of the resulting work must be harmonious or in other words that it must blend with the objective rules of beauty derived from the prevailing harmony that flows throughout our entire cosmos. Harmony is the general state of our universe, of our cosmos that's how we call it the prevailing harmony. It is not something static, all the contrary, it is permanent change. It is transformation from one state to another state. These last centuries, western artists and thinkers concentrated on the idea of an absolute truth. They lost themselves in this sisyphean act of the snapshot FOR truth leading more often than not in the deap valley of certainty where they drowned under the passions arising from those very certainties. We should now make the jump to a superior level and discover how to fabricate snapshots OF truth. I firmly believe that to keep in tune WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principles of life at work throughout our cosmos, we have to concentrate on the sequences between the snapshots while freeing our SUBJECTIVITY of our greed and glory driven ego. For the observer, the sequencing of changes is what ultimately is making sense of each particular moment. The same goes for the art observer. It is indeed the sequencing of changes between colors, between sounds or between ideas and words that ultimately makes sense of those same colors, sounds, ideas and words. Here lays a unique chance to leave the heights of our past searches for certainties. By their very nature, changes don't let us the time to focus on certainties, indeed, the best we can do is to try to surf on the waves of changes, to try to be IN the reality of the situation or to say this otherwise, to try to be in the reality of each moment. ______________ |