Subject: Part 5: now what, how did I come to those conclusions
| Posted By: laodan
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| Posted On: 11/21/2002 10:56 PM
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0 Replies
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Part 5: now what, how did I come to those conclusions.
Painting has been a refuge since my childhood. I had the exceptional chance to have the great WATKINE as master in my teens. He teached me the love of nature and of colors. By the time I attended university in the capital, as young provincial I was attracted by SOMVILLE 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 collegues TIMPER. The decade between SOMVILLE and TIMPER, 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 Castenada's Don Juan and learning with Krishnamurti to appreciate the higher plane of harmony's perpetual change. JIPI showed me how to let lines and colors go where they want free of interference from oneself's will. It also was a time of group painting with PIERROT, STEURS and others culminating with free expression at the "BRASSERIE" that in the end pitifully fell in Walloon pessimism. This is when I quit the marlstrom 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 16 years digesting the philosophical pleasures of insipidity, learning the taste of water and its natural movement down the slopes. During those years, Xiaohong teached me the roots of European classicism and helped me to appreciate technical rigour which I discovered in mass 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 but this technique does not transform automatically what you express into art. Without technique what you express seems inachieved and without intellectual content it is as if what you express is shallow. Artistic achievement, I believe, consists of rich intellectual content packaged in strong and harmonious technical skills and I'm firmly convinced that a new artistic renaissance will bloom sometimes in the 21st century...
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