Bart Lodewijks - Côte Flamande Drawings by Roma Publications

English

Bart Lodewijks Côte Flamande Drawings

Dear Roger, Since this morning, I’ve been unable to get the thought out of my head that it might be time to divide my attention more equitably across society. This was prompted by a telephone conversation I had with someone named Pierre, an art lover living on the coast of Flanders. He and his wife Charlotte have been following my work for ten years, and they’ve decided they would like me to do a wall drawing in their home. ‘We have paintings by Raveel, Tuymans, Borremans and Delvaux; a piece by you would not be out of place amongst them. We’re avid readers of your stories too,’ Pierre told me. When I hung up it occurred to me that in the past twenty years I’ve only ever written about the working class. Although I have done drawings in villas and castles, I never committed those experiences to paper. The characters in my stories tend to live hand-tomouth. In fact, as you know, I’m currently writing about people who have been excluded from society (New Neighbours Part 2). Do you think I’ve created a lopsided picture of humanity by focusing solely on those who are less well off? After all, there are rich people living on our planet too. Why have I never made it my business to tell their stories? Perhaps the time has come to write about these ‘deprived’ individuals. The prison story can surely wait. I can start with Pierre and Charlotte, whom I met ten years ago when the Emergent gallery first opened in Veurne. I think I’ll set off for the Côte Flamande in an effort to redeem myself.

Bart Lodewijks Côte Flamande Drawings

Galerie Emergent, Veurne, 2013

Galerie Emergent, Veurne, 2013-2023 Ten years ago a new gallery opened in Veurne called Emergent, backed by a group of local art lovers as partners. My contribution was a charcoal drawing in the entrance foyer of the sixteenth-century building on the town’s main square, the Grote Markt, that had been made available as an art space. Since then, the gallery has emerged as a communal home base for artists and collectors – and not just adults; children too have made their way there. Some of them inevitably rubbed their hands over my drawing and over time pitch-black smudges appeared on the wall. So, in honour of the gallery’s ten-year anniversary, I decided to clean off the smudges and draw the work anew, only this time in blue. Charlotte congratulated me on the new drawing at the opening. ‘It’s magnificent,’ she said. Encouraged by the compliment, I decide that in another ten years I’ll replace the blue drawing with a red one, then in twenty years that one with a yellow one and in thirty years that one with a green one and so on and so forth – until all the colours have been used up and the gallery no longer needs underlining.

Galerie Emergent, Veurne, 2023

— Pierre is waiting for me at the train station in a light-yellow Morgan, a nineteen-fifties-style British sports car. He waves me over with his straw hat and opens the passenger door. For a minute it feels as if I’m stepping into another era. The soft hood lies neatly folded atop the boot, fastened into place with leather straps so it doesn’t catch in the wind. Pierre is wearing a beautiful pink silk shirt. He smooths his hair with the palm of his hand and places the hat on his head. ‘Did you have an enjoyable train ride?’ he asks, talking with a sort of ponderous precision, as if each word were being finely sifted. ‘I started feeling like I was on vacation on the way here,’ I answer. Despite the roadster’s very low seat, the legroom is surprisingly adequate. He looks at me kindly and asks, ‘Ready to go?’ He may be a retired lawyer but the years do not seem to have caught up to him. As the racing car gathers speed, his shirt sleeves billow in the wind and his hat slides backwards, pulling taut the leather strap attached to the brim and pressing it against his Adam’s apple. He is every bit the Sunday driver, a vanishing breed among motorists. ‘Finding a hat that sits properly is an art in itself,’ he points out. I bet I could make him happy with a well-fitting hat or a race car cap; it’s the little things that make us happy, I think, then smile at my foolishness. He waves to a pedestrian and yields right-of-way to a young woman pulling a cart containing three dozing toddlers. ‘We had such a laugh in London,’ he recalls. ‘The whole gang was there.’ ‘I really thought you had all come just to see me,’ I respond. ‘We did.’ But the smirk on his face betrays the truth. He’s referring to my exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 2015. Of course, I knew it was a coincidence that the annual Emergent gallery art trip coincided with the opening of my exposition, but what does it matter? ‘What a beautiful old-fashioned car,’ I say. ‘Charlotte and I are taking it cruising through England in a couple of weeks. The British have fond memories of these sports cars. In 2019 a new model was released based on the old design

but with modern-day technology. That’s the version I bought in 2020. Morgan prides itself, too, on the fact that they have forty thousand colours to choose from. The nice thing is that wherever you drive it, the car makes people smile. These automobiles are revered,’ he explains. As soon as we leave the city behind, the needles on the dashboard shoot up. Zooming towards his house along the coastal road, I breathe in the warm, salty sea air and imagine myself back in the banner year of 2015, when we all descended on a café next to Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition had just opened, so my work was done. I was on a roll and felt revered.

Whitechapel Gallery, Londen, 2015

Whitechapel Gallery, Londen, 2015 White chalk lines do not show up well on white walls. They belong outdoors, in the lived space. In a white cube they are smothered. In that regard, the drawings I make on a corrugated wall and a tarred fence – hiding from view a car park and a vacant lot, respectively, not far from Whitechapel Gallery – come out beautifully. The lines rescue the walls from obscurity, freeing up space I can’t find in the gallery. I draw on the walls of the exhibition space with charcoal, in search of a deeper layer – a difficult task. Although there is much beauty contained within the drawing, that is not my primary goal. The lines are fingers pointing to the outside.

Whitechapel Gallery, Londen, 2015

— A pot of mussels and a carafe of white wine sit on the table. Six wild rabbits hop about in the garden. ‘It must be hot for those critters as well,’ Pierre says. ‘It’s a mystery to me where they get their water,’ Charlotte muses. ‘I never see them taking a drink. Do you think they get it from the grass?’ But the marram grass edging the dune about twelve feet away looks parched. ‘Ever since the municipality removed the top peat layer, the rainwater disappears instantly down into the ground instead of leaving pools on the surface. Yet despite that, the critters manage to survive,’ Pierre adds. I look at the puzzling creatures and wonder what I would do if I were a rabbit. He interrupts my thoughts by asking, ‘Shall I show you the house?’ In the living room, there’s a painting by Roger Raveel, flanked by a drawing I instantly recognize as one of the master’s preparatory studies. There is a large work by Paul Delvaux hanging in the study. ‘He also did a portrait of my mother in 1961. That painting is hanging in the guest room; you’ll see it shortly. If you stay the night, you’ll be sharing the room with a Delvaux,’ Pierre mentions, as if this were perfectly normal. ‘My parents were good friends of his. My father even wrote a wonderful, sweet book about him that I’ll give you a copy of. When we were first married, Charlotte posed for him for a few years. He was living in Koksijde and Veurne at the time. And in the background of my mother’s portrait you can see a faithful rendition of the yard at our family home in Veurne. As for the Borremans, that’s in storage; there’s currently nothing of his on display.’ The house is a tastefully decorated bungalow with a mezzanine. Newspapers and open books are lying on a glass reading table. ‘I’m reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan,’ Pierre says. ‘Frans gave it to me for Christmas a couple of years ago. You know Frans, right?’ ‘I certainly do.’ ‘I started rereading it as soon as I finished, because it’s such a magnificent book and provides one of the best historical overviews of the world I’ve ever read. It should be required reading for anyone who wants

to be well-informed.’ Lying next to the Frankopan book is the recently published Over Woke by the Flemish politician Bart De Wever, which I haven’t yet had a chance to read. ‘The house was built in the seventies by Charlotte’s brother, Alain Houtsaeger, an architect whose office was in De Panne until he moved to the Luberon in France and started working there. Nowadays it’s almost impossible anymore to build so close to the dunes,’ Pierre explains. He brushes his hand across the wall and adds, ‘How the workers cursed these rough concrete blocks.’ We climb the stairs and I see an early work by Luc Tuymans. It’s painted in Tuymans’s distinctive muted colours and depicts a semi-nude middle-aged man staring into space, or is he looking away from something, casting his eyes down? ‘Gorgeous,’ I say, examining the brushwork. ‘The title of the painting is Der Diagnostische Blick VI and it’s from 1992. We bought it that very year from Frank Demaegd of Zeno X gallery in Antwerp. It’s hung here for years, whereas the other works all rotate,’ Pierre says. I try to imagine such a rotation in action. Art works must be constantly coming and going here. But the drawings I do won’t be a part of that; they’ll be stuck to the wall. ‘You’re free to draw wherever you want, but we thought the stairwell would be the best option,’ he points out. The pockmarked surface of the accursed concrete blocks will provide a rewarding substratum for the chalk. You can lay it on thick, whereby the powder piles up in relief. It occurs to me that I might use a variety of chalk colours all together. Perhaps it’s my age (I’m closing in on fifty), but more and more colour has been creeping into my work. Should I be concerned about that? Certainly not. What’s more concerning is the possibility of damage to the carpet at the top of the stairs. With its overlapping ochre tints, it reminds me of water flowing in and out of rivulets and gullies at low tide; or the earthy colours could be those of the lost peat layer. My mind wanders back to the thirsty rabbits in the yard before returning to the task at hand. It’s pretty much a given that chalk dust will fall down onto the carpet while I am drawing, so to prevent that, I will need to tape off the floor. In addition, the stairwell is not very well lit and there’s not much room to manoeuvre; it will be difficult to get

a good perspective on the drawing. My experience navigating the claustrophobic space in the prison last month is bound to come in handy. There it was extremely tight quarters and the piercing glances of the prisoners didn’t make things any easier. At least here I won’t have to deal with a cellmate, except… I take another look at the man in the painting, the long-time resident of this stairwell. He’s not exactly a sympathetic figure. Fortunately, he’s not flesh and blood either.

My original idea was to fill the stairwell in completely. It has been a long-held wish of mine to create a drawing that melds with the architecture. But when Charlotte sees the design in my sketchbook, she says, ‘We’d rather not have to move the Tuymans.’ And since the Tuymans will remain in its spot, I ditch the idea of an all-encompassing drawing and decide to go for nuance instead.

Pierre and Charlotte have gone shopping. It’s dead quiet, just me and the paintings and sculptures. I place a dark-blue stripe in chalk on the edge of the wall at the foot of the staircase. I’m the first artist here to create a work on the house. The line can neither be moved nor removed; instead, it is inextricably bound to the architecture and the art collection. There’s no going back.

The chairs against the wall are not for sitting in. Above them hangs a Raveel. His colours integrate seamlessly with those of the chalk drawing.

By being in the right spot, the drawing claims its own right to exist.

The drawing becomes an indispensable part of the architecture.

The orange stripe disrupts the structure of the drawing, keeping me on my toes and forcing me to take risks.

By leaving some sections empty, I incorporate the concrete blocks into the work as well.

I refuse to add purple or red to the drawing. Purple is the hooligan of the colour spectrum, and red demands too much attention, derailing the conversation and causing all hell to break loose.

The drawing’s success is predicated on having the right sequence of colour blocks. Step by step it climbs to the rafters.

‘They’re the colours of the North Sea,’ Pierre says when he gets back.

— ‘They’re holding sailing races along the beach. It’s worth going to watch,’ Pierre announces. ‘I can’t,’ I say regrettably. ‘I’m bound to the drawing, not free to do as I please.’ ‘I’ll get you some coffee,’ he replies. I walk with him to the back of the house. From the living room you can get a good view of the drawing. It’s colourful, tall and narrow, especially narrow, and despite its height, it isn’t overpowering, which is good. ‘Phone call for you,’ Pierre says, holding out his cell phone. ‘Is Pitoutje satisfied?’ asks the voice on the other end of the line. It’s Frans, who’s been there from the beginning. He’s a good friend of Pierre’s, the one who gave him The Silk Roads as a gift, and he was there in London, too, where he quickly earned the nickname ‘Jolly Frans’. Not long ago, at an exhibition of eight photos of my drawings accompanied by brief narratives, he had said, ‘I want to buy one but can’t decide between the line drawing on the house in Ghent or the chalk planes in the slums of Calcutta.’ How typical of Frans, I thought at the time: he sees the good in everything and can never choose. ‘Would you prefer the most beautiful or the most conceptually powerful print?’ I asked to help him along. ‘The latter,’ he answered.

My drawings never exist in a void: they are tied to stories captured in publications and limited editions.

Print from 2022 about drawings in Ghent (84 x 119 cm)

‘Frans,’ I say, ‘as you know, I always engage with the residents in the neighbourhoods where I draw. In this house those are paintings. Raveel seems to hold me in good favour but the staring man in the Tuymans painting is difficult to read. If I take the drawing more deeply into the stairwell, I’ll have to confront Tuymans… And you know his reputation.’ It’s silent at the other end of the line. ‘Bart, are you still there?’ he finally asks. ‘Remember what you advised when I was buying your print…? You talked about the difference between aesthetics and concept. My advice would be to not try and compete with the painting but to enter into a dialogue with it. Pretend the stairwell is a street and the painting one of its inhabitants.’

Print from 2022 about drawings in Calcutta (84 x 119 cm)

The drawing on the edge of the partition wall in front of the stairwell is set against the background of the reading nook and the kitchen table, where my telephone conversation with Frans took place.

Since I started addressing the man on the canvas by his first name, he’s become an encouraging presence. We don’t exchange any words, but that also happens in the best of neighbourhoods. With the help of this private alliance I bring the drawing to fruition.

The drawing at the top of the stairwell, facing the painting, is the same as that on the ground floor, but then horizontal. The drawing permeates my mind with the force of glowing coal, anchored by the orange line in the middle.

I draw for three days, at the end of which Pierre drives me back to the train station. ‘Charlotte and I are extremely happy with the result, but we never discussed a price. Have you calculated the cost?’ ‘It’s free,’ I say. ‘My drawings are not for sale. They are impermanent, even if they are affixed to a wall. They have a different kind of value than a painting. For one thing, you can’t invest in them.’ ‘On the street the drawings wash away in the rain,’ Pierre responds. ‘I understand that. But it’s not going to rain inside our house, so that’s a different situation… I didn’t intend it to be an investment, and you have to earn a living too.’ ‘Do you want to keep the drawings?’ I ask, feigning surprise. ‘Yes, Charlotte and I are very pleased with how they turned out. They are in the colours of the North Sea, as I said… How did you set the price for the work in the prison? Didn’t they have to pay you, or was it charity?’ ‘The drawings in the prison were also done at no cost, but since the management wanted to keep them, I fixed them. I fixed them so indelibly that they will remain in place forever, which gives them a different value. The management rewarded me royally for that. If you and Charlotte want to keep the drawings, then I can fix them for you as well. There is a cost associated with that, albeit cheaper than at the prison. But the drawings themselves are and will remain free.’ ‘How does that go when you’re drawing on the street?’ ‘I ask the residents ahead of time whether they are open to having something as intrusive yet temporary as a chalk drawing on their house. They usually give their permission without much trouble, especially once I explain that the rain will wash it away, giving them a hard-and-fast guarantee. Their house will eventually return to its original state. It makes no sense to make the residents foot the bill for my project. They didn’t ask me to come do a drawing there. So I shield them from any financial repercussions. And it would be unfair to make you and Charlotte pay for something just because you happen to have more financial resources than they do. My drawings don’t take status

or wealth into account.’ ‘But what is your business model then? Can you live off of just fixing alone? That would be incredible.’ ‘Drawing in chalk is an act of humility for me; I don’t want to be accountable for it. My earnings model revolves around fixing the drawings. It’s an untapped market.’ ‘But what if people decide to fix your drawing on their own?’ ‘Then they’re nicking it. But they wouldn’t do that, because we know each other. And I know where they live.’ ‘But what if they do it anyway?’ ‘If someone fixes one of my drawings without my knowledge, then that’s considered misappropriation and intellectual property theft, per Section 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it’s never happened.’ ‘But what if it does happen?’ ‘Then the drawing no longer belongs to me.’ ‘Those are some very poetic underpinnings to your rationale. I once read a poem in the courtroom as part of a client’s defence because it’s important to make people think about things. Otherwise, they become robots. No wonder you’re such a writer.’ ‘Writing is also a way of fixing things, of capturing them. I capture in words that which is revealed in the process of drawing. The books, and since recently also limited editions, lend themselves perfectly to that.’

— The Morgan’s hood is down, and Pierre has his straw hat firmly fastened onto his head so it won’t blow back when he takes off. ‘Let’s call the drawing Côte Flamande,’ I say. He nods. ‘Come back soon to fix it.’ It’s still very hot. People walk along the pavement in beachwear. ‘What’s next for you. Do you have any big projects?’ Pierre asks. ‘I’m going to be pretty busy,’ I answer. ‘First I have to finish the story about the work in the prison. But I might also write about the three days I spent in your house.’ I join the holidaymakers in the train, waving to Pierre from behind the coach window as he waves back with his straw hat.

Colophon Drawings and text: Bart Lodewijks Photographs: Jan Kempenaers (cover, pp. 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39), Bart Lodewijks (pp. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 32, 33) Editing original Dutch text: Lucy Klaassen English translation: Nina Woodson Image processing: Huig Bartels Design: Roger Willems Publisher: Roma Publications, Amsterdam Special thanks to: Pierre Debra and Charlotte Houtsaeger, Frans Buyse, Lieven Pyfferoen, Frank Maes, Danielle van Zuijlen, Galerie Emergent © Bart Lodewijks, 2024

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