A Moveable Feat: One Artist's Journey of
the Imagination I Guy Goethals
When we look across the work of Tilde Van Uytven, we notice some remarkable and compelling shifts. The most striking of these - so much so, that we may call it a caesura - is the transition from drawing to painting, from the narrative to the pictural. Automatically I am prompted to think of the conflict between the Venetians and Florentines in 15th century renaissance Italy, with each side having an opposing opinion regarding the criteria one must strive to satisfy in producing good art work. For the Florentines it was the ‘disegnatore’ (il disegno), the drawing, which took center-stage. The Venetians, on the other hand, sided with the primacy of 'il colore', the tonal and the pictural, as the determinative conditions for representing reality. In essence, the origin of this discussion harks back well prior to the Christian era, and later - during the time of Rubens - it reemerged as an en vogue point of debate. Closer to us, the dispute was pursued by the neoclassicist Ingres, inclined to favor the drawing pen to the paintbrush wielding of Delacroix. And so, this age-old story surreptitiously steals its way into the work of Tilde Van Uytven, only here the battle is engaged by two sides of her own oeuvre.
Gallery
From graphic design to painting, drawing inspiration from light and form in nature and portraying it in watercolour.
The moon in the sky -
a bird flies across its face,
two worlds in harmony (Kawai Sora, 17th century)