Painting shoes
Seen in the Roger Raveel Museum in Machelen (close to Ghent, - BE). Not so many painters in Belgium have their own museum. The work is entitled ‘Thuis’, which is ‘at home’ (the usual place where you can take off your shoes). It is made in 1973 of oil paint and ‘mixed media’. This mix is true because the shoes –most likely from Raveel himself, are for real. They are integrated in the painting by some added blue in exactly the right tint. So the shoes are also a little bit painted. The black line, overstepped by the right shoe, is a typical Roger Raveel line; if you see a rather rudimentary painted work in Belgium with not too many details and with somewhere a clear solid line in it, it is probably a Raveel. This overstepping shoe is another reason why I like this painting; it somehow depicts the desire to enter into a new space, which could be ‘home’. As you can see, there is an excess of daylight pouring into the museum, but the light in the room of this painting is more tempered. This provides momentum to the optimistic blue paint, which somehow seems to flow from the painting into the museum’s interior; this is no coincidence, this painter wants his painting to do just that. The environment was always very important for his work. He even used his artworks to make people aware of local environmental issues like pollution or the replacement of rivers by canals (‘Club of Rome’-issues which became more prominent in the nineteen seventies and –eighties). His art was sometimes the tool of an activist with a different kind of looking at things. Thus, even an artwork called ‘at home’ has this interaction between home and the surrounding space.
Painting shoes
Seen in the Roger Raveel Museum in Machelen (close to Ghent, - BE). Not so many painters in Belgium have their own museum. The work is entitled ‘Thuis’, which is ‘at home’ (the usual place where you can take off your shoes). It is made in 1973 of oil paint and ‘mixed media’. This mix is true because the shoes –most likely from Raveel himself, are for real. They are integrated in the painting by some added blue in exactly the right tint. So the shoes are also a little bit painted. The black line, overstepped by the right shoe, is a typical Roger Raveel line; if you see a rather rudimentary painted work in Belgium with not too many details and with somewhere a clear solid line in it, it is probably a Raveel. This overstepping shoe is another reason why I like this painting; it somehow depicts the desire to enter into a new space, which could be ‘home’. As you can see, there is an excess of daylight pouring into the museum, but the light in the room of this painting is more tempered. This provides momentum to the optimistic blue paint, which somehow seems to flow from the painting into the museum’s interior; this is no coincidence, this painter wants his painting to do just that. The environment was always very important for his work. He even used his artworks to make people aware of local environmental issues like pollution or the replacement of rivers by canals (‘Club of Rome’-issues which became more prominent in the nineteen seventies and –eighties). His art was sometimes the tool of an activist with a different kind of looking at things. Thus, even an artwork called ‘at home’ has this interaction between home and the surrounding space.