Ten Wijngaerde Painting

The cloister of the Beguines in Bruges must be known to every visitor to the city. There are innumerable photographs that have been taken. I have walked in its grounds since I was a small boy so I felt it was time to define my sense of the place. The surrounding streets have a very different, hard paved, well swept, practical character shared with all historic towns and cities in the Low Countries. Bricks and cobbles, not water and grass. I try to eliminate any spatial cues, treating all elements with equal pictorial value as zones of colour separated by lines of unpainted canvas. The cottages and their garden walls are divided into four elements, slashed from lower right to top left by four dark diagonal trees. Stepping up in the opposite direction there are three earth based colours, from pink to orange tracing the brick work of the adjoining buildings into the orange of the roof tiles. The trees in the cloister have a distinct lean to them as if a prevailing wind had driven them to slant one way, accentuated by running their dark lines from the green of the cloister up through to the pink of the surrounding buildings. Four vertical zones crossed by four slanting lines tree trunks. Their darkness contrasts against the white of the buildings. I painted them in Van Dyke Brown with a rippling stroke overpainted in light ochre and orange; ochre livening up the pink brick work and the orange is the same as that used for the roof tiles in two of the vertical stripes. The well-established back garden trees is darker and fluid. The grass in the cloister I rendered as a series of horizontal green stripes textured by brush strokes run in equal depth lines sloping in opposite directions with a third line running horizontally. This allowed me to incorporate a line of “shadows” extending from the base of the trees, composed of the blue I had used in the darker parts of of the trees combined with the orange of the tiles.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:24 W x 29.9 H x 0.8 D in

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