"Morcelle" Lahamaide. 1980. Belgium.
Oil on wooden panel
Size: 56 x 70 cm (22" x 27.6")
Morcelle is a landscape of the Hill region in Belgium.
Earlier I painted impressionist landscapes, much influenced by Van Gogh and Gauguin. If my memory does not fail me, this is the first landscape where I left behind the image as it is absorbed by the retina, at least partially. If you positioned yourself at the same spot from where I was looking when I made this painting, you would indeed clearly see that the landscape is there in the painting but it is obviously not a realist rendering of that landscape.
What was new for me was to start working in the material and suggest something else than a landscape as for a second reading or as for a second degree observation of the image. The image, a landscape (first degree), becomes a portrait of the observer (second degree). The bottom of the landscape is the port of entry of the observer into the landscape, the view is from one of the windows of my house. Further higher in the painting, somewhere mid height, two houses form the eyes, the mouth is given by a pink slash in the wheat field just under the eyes.
What can't be seen on your display is the third degree of visual representation. For example, the line of the horizon is made of the text of a poem telling about my feelings about this particular environment and some sections of the painting are giving my vision of the spirit in that particular place, the personality of the people living in that place. Popol resting in his garden, Pierrot recluse in his house,...
I made a serie of landscapes in the same approach in 1980. They must be somewhere, here on a wall of someone I have known then, there in an attic or nailed on the wall of a pigeon cage. Who knows, I'm only sure of one thing and that is that I don't have any of these paintings anymore. The image here above is from the only landscape that remained in my possession.
In 1980 I was working on my house and by end of that same year we started the "Brasserie" by which time I had unknowingly embarked on a twenty year frenetic trip that would leave no time for me to play in the colors.
My next paintings will be realized in Beijing in 2001. One of them is a memory landscape of "Morcelle".
Earlier I painted impressionist landscapes, much influenced by Van Gogh and Gauguin. If my memory does not fail me, this is the first landscape where I left behind the image as it is absorbed by the retina, at least partially. If you positioned yourself at the same spot from where I was looking when I made this painting, you would indeed clearly see that the landscape is there in the painting but it is obviously not a realist rendering of that landscape.
What was new for me was to start working in the material and suggest something else than a landscape as for a second reading or as for a second degree observation of the image. The image, a landscape (first degree), becomes a portrait of the observer (second degree). The bottom of the landscape is the port of entry of the observer into the landscape, the view is from one of the windows of my house. Further higher in the painting, somewhere mid height, two houses form the eyes, the mouth is given by a pink slash in the wheat field just under the eyes.
What can't be seen on your display is the third degree of visual representation. For example, the line of the horizon is made of the text of a poem telling about my feelings about this particular environment and some sections of the painting are giving my vision of the spirit in that particular place, the personality of the people living in that place. Popol resting in his garden, Pierrot recluse in his house,...
I made a serie of landscapes in the same approach in 1980. They must be somewhere, here on a wall of someone I have known then, there in an attic or nailed on the wall of a pigeon cage. Who knows, I'm only sure of one thing and that is that I don't have any of these paintings anymore. The image here above is from the only landscape that remained in my possession.
In 1980 I was working on my house and by end of that same year we started the "Brasserie" by which time I had unknowingly embarked on a twenty year frenetic trip that would leave no time for me to play in the colors.
My next paintings will be realized in Beijing in 2001. One of them is a memory landscape of "Morcelle".
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