Artsense n#34 Painting

Born in Ellezelles, Belgium in 1951. I had the exceptional chance to have the great WATKINE 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 and attended some of his classes at the Boitsfort Academy of Arts. The following decade 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 Don Juan and learning with KRISHNAMURTI to appreciate the higher plane of harmony's perpetual change.JIPI, the Flemish shaman, showed me how to let lines and colors go where they want free of interference from our 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 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 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 but this technique does not transform automatically 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.