One morning last February, in a chilly studio in Brussels, 28 people in white coats gathered to watch Sylvie Van der Kelen paint the sky. \u201cThe first touch of the brush is generally the best,\u201d said Van der Kelen as light, pink-tinged clouds began to appear. \u201cIt is preferable not to make revisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a few days this winter I was allowed to sit in on classes at the \u00c9cole Van der Kelen-Logelain, a mythologised painting school in Brussels that is unlike any other arts education institution in the world. Run by the same family since it was founded in 1892, the Van der Kelen course takes place every winter underneath its glass and wrought iron roof, extending out of the back of a gothic brick townhouse.<\/p>\n
A trompe d\u2019oeil relief art work at the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n
Students must arrive by 9am, otherwise they will be shut out until lunchtime; they must not bring phones or cameras into the school\u2019s workspace; they must wear white lab coats while they work; and they must work in silence. They also must be able to stand the cold: the studio is ineffectually heated by an ancient single wood-fired stove nicknamed \u201cla mama\u201d, an ancient metal contraption that gently ticks over by the entrance.<\/p>\n
If students can tolerate these strictures, by the end of the six-month course they will possess a number of specialised skills, from sign painting and lettering to the application of gold and silver leaf, and manipulation of textural finishes. The core of the course, though \u2013 what the school is most famous for \u2013 is its trompe l\u2019oeil painting techniques.<\/p>\n
Literally translated as \u201cdeceive the eye\u201d, trompe l\u2019oeil refers to a genre of illusionistic painting with a history stretching back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, in which artists use textures, shading and tricks of perspective in order to create three-dimensional illusions. At the Van der Kelen, students learn to conjure fake relief sculptures and architectural details out of flat surfaces; create copies, in oil paints, of 28 different types of wood grain and 33 different types of marble; and, like Sylvie, paint a perfect trompe l\u2019oeil sky. (A tip: clouds are rarely rounded, more often \u201celongated like the shape of the human body\u201d.)<\/p>\n
Lucy McKenzie\u2019s Quodlibet XX (Fascism) Close. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n
When the Van der Kelen was founded by Sylvie\u2019s grandfather Alfred, it capitalised on a late-19th century vogue for the style: scores of housepainters graduated with careers in highly paid decorative painting ahead of them. In the 21st century, however, the school has found itself facing existential challenges. The passion for decorative painting among the wealthy upper middle class has evaporated, and fussy-seeming trompe l\u2019oeil has fallen out of style in interior decoration and high art. Student numbers have correspondingly dropped to dangerously low levels.<\/p>\n
And yet, every winter, the family continue to oversee a course that has barely changed since 1892, and students still arrive from across the world to put themselves through a bizarre and sometimes punishing routine (\u201cThere is roughly one breakdown every week,\u201d a student told me). What keeps the school standing \u2013 and why do so many aspiring artists still find their way to this chilly studio in Brusselshere?<\/p>\n
Federico Piccolo at work at the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody is in search for something special here,\u201d Sylvie tells me after her demonstration that morning as the students quietly set to work. \u201cEveryone is here for a reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year marks the first time that Sylvie, 52, has taken over the running of the school from her mother Denise \u2013 the \u201cCoco Chanel of fake marble\u201d \u2013 who herself has been in charge since 1995. (Though she officially retired last year, the 82-year-old known among students as \u201cMadame\u201d remains a presence in the school, regularly drifting into the workshop to dispense advice. Her comments range from the practical \u2013 \u201cYou have made a lot of white accents, it\u2019s too much\u201d \u2013 to more oblique statements. \u201cSometimes the wind is blowing longer,\u201d I hear her tell one student.)<\/p>\n
Brushes hanging up at the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n
With Denise\u2019s help, Sylvie oversees a schedule that has barely changed since the school\u2019s inception. Students must attend the workshop from 9am to 6pm five days a week, and half a day on Saturday. Every morning a new technique is demonstrated by one of the Van der Kelens (the school invites outside teachers to teach extra classes, but only members of the family teach the core trompe l\u2019oeil course). The students observe and make notes, before producing an exact copy themselves on a large sheet of paper; this piece of work is known as a \u201cpanel\u201d.<\/p>\n
No panel, however, can be finished in a single day, because each requires multiple \u201coperations\u201d: different stages of work, separated by a day or more to allow the drying of paints and varnishes. As a result, students end up with a dizzying number of panels in progress at any one time, with more added every morning. Even after the workshop closes at 6pm, everyone has homework, sometimes until midnight. \u201cIt\u2019s brutal,\u201d one student, a British painter, told me. \u201cEvery day you\u2019re learning something new, and just when you think you\u2019ve got good at it, another panel arrives to cut you down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why would anyone put themselves through this? Talking to this year\u2019s cohort, I hear a number of reasons. There\u2019s a small but significant contingent of people from various professions \u2013 architects, graphic designers, interior designers \u2013 who have become dissatisfied with the computer-based nature of their industry and are looking for something more hands-on. After graduating, students might hope to find work as painting assistants for established artists, painting interiors for wealthy clients, working on film or theatre sets, or working for European fashion houses periodically drawn to the trompe l\u2019oeil aesthetic for runway shows and boutiques.<\/p>\n
Madame Van der Kelen enters the workshop. Photograph: Felix Bazalgettedouble quotation markThe Van der Kelen is a\u00a0national treasure. It should be Unesco\u00a0protected<\/p>\n
Every student from an arts background that I speak to, however, cites the work of another painter, Lucy McKenzie, who has arguably done more to revive the school\u2019s fortunes than any other person of late. The young Glaswegian artist was browsing in a secondhand bookshop in Brussels in 2007 when she came across a mention of the school in a book of interiors and \u2013 amazed that such a place still existed \u2013 immediately enrolled. At that time, McKenzie was almost a decade into an already accomplished arts career, but she signed on because she found the school\u2019s illusionistic techniques fascinating: for her, they were associated with \u201cprofound human connections of carnivals, fairgrounds, markets\u201d, in contrast to the \u201cresistant and hermetic\u201d nature of much contemporary art at the time.<\/p>\n
A student\u2019s collection of paints and brushes at the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
By the mid-oos, the school was in crisis. Class sizes had fallen: just 10 or 11 students, from an interwar peak of more than 100. Its competitors had all closed down, and it seemed like the school, and the unique skills it taught, was destined to go the same way.<\/p>\n
That is until McKenzie used the school\u2019s techniques to create thrilling large-scale paintings, such as the vertigo-inducing Untitled (2010), and, along with a book she published about her time at the school, it is works such as these \u2013 exhibited at London\u2019s Tate Britain, Amsterdam\u2019s Steidlijk and the Art<\/a> Institute of Chicago \u2013 that have caused a steadily increasing stream of students to arrive at the Van der Kelen\u2019s imposing wooden doors. \u201cLucy McKenzie has a lot to answer for,\u201d one student told me cheerfully, as he contemplated the daunting amount of work ahead of him.<\/p>\n Sylvie Van der Kelen believes that the skills and the styles her family teach go in and out of fashion according to 40-year cycles. There was a huge demand in the 1920s and 30s, and then again in the 70s and 80s, but by the mid-2000s, the Van der Kelen was, in Sylvie\u2019s words, \u201cregarded as something a little bit dusty\u201d. In the last decade, however, there\u2019s once again been a growing interest in trompe l\u2019oeil and decorative painting \u2013 including a major exhibition at the Met on cubism and trompe l\u2019oeil, and a number of younger artists exploring<\/a> the possibilities of the form.<\/p>\n The gothic facade of the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n The fluctuating fortunes of the school reflect those of trompe l\u2019oeil as a genre. Sometimes the technique has been seen as the highest form of art \u2013 an aspiration for ancient Greeks and Renaissance painters \u2013 and other times it has been called cheap \u201ctrickery\u201d, as John Ruskin wrote in 1843.<\/p>\n Often dismissed as a \u201cpopular\u201d form of art, it also seems to come back into fashion among the rich during times of great inequality \u2013 in recent years Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Acne Studios have all experimented with trompe l\u2019oeil-inspired illusions in their collections.<\/p>\n The criticisms aimed at trompe l\u2019oeil and decorative-style painting \u2013 that it is inaccessible or outdated \u2013 could arguably also be levelled at the Van der Kelen school itself, an entity that has resisted change since its founding, with a fee of \u20ac13,750 (tools and materials included). (McKenzie says a sizable number in her cohort were simply \u201cposh kids who liked art but didn\u2019t want to go to art school\u201d.) Should the school be dismissed as a reactionary institution, a relic from another era?<\/p>\n Two students at work on their panels at the Van der Kelen. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n \u201cThat would be reductive,\u201d says McKenzie, arguing that the Van der Kelen, for all its idiosyncrasies, \u201cis a national treasure. It should be Unesco protected. Aspects of its identity are conservative, but \u2018complaints about the awful modern world\u2019 is not the kind of thing that they offer. You get the skills and you do what you want with them. I personally took them and did as much as I could, and still try to.\u201d<\/p>\n For Sylvie and her mother, their work is important as a way to \u201cpreserve these techniques\u201d, many of which are not taught anywhere else. More fundamentally, there\u2019s the joy that comes from seeing students \u2013 \u201cmy kids\u201d, Sylvie calls them \u2013 develop into skilled artists every winter. \u201cThey all discover something in themselves, working here,\u201d Denise tells me.<\/p>\n As for the future of the school, the week when I visit is half-term, and Sylvie\u2019s 10-year-old son Hilaire can be seen playing with fragments of wood and marble around the balcony, as Sylvie used to do. \u201cMy father\u2019s life was the students and the workshop, nothing else,\u201d she remembers.<\/p>\n Untitled 2010 by Lucy McKenzie. Photograph: Felix Bazalgette<\/p>\n Sylvie had a career as an archaeologist before taking over the school, studying some of the earliest examples of trompe l\u2019oeil from around the world, in ancient Egypt and on the walls of villas in Pompeii. She is adamant that she was always sure she would return to the family business. What about Hilaire?<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes he says he wants to take it over, sometimes not,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a really nice job that he is going to learn,\u201d says Denise, more certain of what his future will hold. \u201cI think he will be convinced.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One morning last February, in a chilly studio in Brussels, 28 people in white coats gathered to watch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-546530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}