Bruno Vekemans

The Artwork of Bruno Vekemans

Born in 1952 at Berchem, a southern district of Antwerp, Bruno Vekemans was a Belgian painter, draftsman and etcher. Considered a post-modernist, he was primarily concerned with figurative work which included portraits. Vekemans also created urban landscapes and anecdotal scenes with characters.

As a child and later a teenager, Bruno Vekemans was constantly engaged in drawing and painting. He enrolled at the Technicum de Londenstraat, an industrial arts and design school, where he took several courses in decoration. Vekemans also had some basic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berchem. His skill at drawing was heavily influenced by his many visits to Antwerp’s Museum of Fine Arts where he studied the works of the Flemish masters as well as the early works of expressionist painter James Ensor.

Vekemans was, however, basically self-taught; his own unique strong and mysterious style was developed after years of experimentation with shape and color. His painting underwent various modifications before its dramatic resolution in the 1990s. Vekemans started his experiments with different techniques in 1971, using collages, comics, and églomisé, the application of a design and gilding on the rear face of glass. He often started his work with various photos or images from magazines, to which he added, combined or eliminated elements.

In 1988, Bruno Vekemans focused on linear works, most of which were applications of gouache on patterned paper. He later replaced the patterned paper with seventeenth-century paper and also began experiments with oil paints on canvas. Vekemans simplified the image and used chiaroscuro to create different lighting effects. He used vibrant, intense colors, often transparent with different levels of opacity in tones tinged with blues, browns and blacks. Throughout his paintings, collages and drawings, Vekemans maintained an aura of solitude and mystery in both his portraits and cityscapes.

Vekemans frequently exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria, France, Australia and the United States. His first verified exhibition was at Amsterdam’s Jaski Art Gallery in 2006. An important step in Vekemans’s career was his 2015 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Other notable exhibitions were retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires and Havana’s Museo Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba where he exhibited his thematic series on Cuba. A posthumous retrospective of his work, “Bruno Vekemans: Zelfportrettten”, was held in 2023 at Antwerp’s Galerie Verbeeck-Van Dyck.

Bruno Vekemans passed away on the twenty-second of July in 2019, a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. In 2020, he was posthumously named an honorary citizen of the Antwerp municipality of Brasschaat.

Second Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Man Met Koffer (Man with Suitcase)”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 79 x 57 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Tango Dancer”, 1895, Gouache on Patterned Paper, 92 x 78 cm, Private Collection

Talon Abraxas

The Artwork of Talon Abraxas

Born in South London, England in 1980, Talon Abraxas is a symbolist artist, writer and occultist whose work consists of both traditional and digital images. Symbolism in painting was a fantastic, often mystic, style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of realist and impressionist trends. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in an objective, quasi-scientific manner. This style of painting emphasized the world of dreams and the religious traditions of human transformation; it placed the appearance of literature, music and the arts over their functions.

A self-taught artist, Talon Abraxas regards an artist as a spontaneously developed initiate (Greek: μύστης) whose work conveys spirituality and religious mysteries to the world. The inspiration for his work is drawn from past mystic artists and writers, including English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, Belgian symbolist painter and author Jean Delville, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, and Polish surrealist painter and sculptor Zdislaw Beksiński.

The Talon Abraxas Facebook site contains many images of Talon Abraxas’s work as well as other contemporary artists: https://www.facebook.com/p/Talon-Abraxas-100050477380184/

Notes: Archons are the supernatural builders of the physical universe, each one related to one of the seven classical planets visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, ordered according to their brightness. Abraxas is the term for the “Great Archon” in Gnostic Christianity. The word is found in such Gnostic texts as the “Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit” and the “Apocalypse of Adam”. Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Salamis, Cyprus at the end of the fourth-century, designated Abraxas (Biblical Greek: ἀβραξάς) to be “the power above all, and First Principle” and “the cause and first archetype” of all things.

Archon (Greek: ἄρχων) is the Greek word that means “ruler”. It is the masculine present participle of the verb stem αρχ-, meaning “to rule, to be first”. Throughout Greek history, the term Archon referred to the chief magistrates of various Greek cities. In the Byzantine empire, the term was used to denote a powerful noble or magnate, both domestic and foreign. Today, in Orthodox Christianity, archon is a honorific title given to someone who has served and promoted the Orthodox Church faith and tradition, a sworn duty of the archon. As it is a significant religious position, the faith and dedication of a candidate for the role are reviewed extensively during consideration.

Top Insert Image: Talon Abraxas, “Phoibos (Phoebus) Apollon”, Date Unknown, Digital Art

Bottom Insert Image: Talon Abraxas, “New Jerusalem”, Date Unknown, Digital Art

Edward Saidi Tingatinga

The Artwork of Edward Saidi Tingatinga

Born in 1932, Edward Saidi Tingatinga was a self-taught Tanzanian artist who developed a unique painting style that evolved into an urban traditional art form. Once established as an artist, he taught his style to many students, both local and foreign.

Edward Saidi Tingatinga was born in 1937 to a family of subsistence farmers at the small village of Mindu in southern Tanzania near the border of Mozambique. He left his village in 1957 and worked on a sisal plantation in the Tanga district. Tingatinga traveled in the latter part of 1957 to Dar-es-Salaam where he labored in construction jobs and as a gardener until 1961. He relocated to the Mikoroshoni district where he met and married his wife Agatha Mataka. After the birth of his son Daudi, Tingatinga became employed in 1968 as a ward attendant at the public Muhimbili Hospital.

Impressed by the number of tourists who purchased western-styled paintings from Zairian artists, Tingatinga began to paint in 1968 and soon developed his own particular style of colorful, crowded paintings of fantastic animals and dancing tribesmen, as well as scenes of village life. The paintings sold well and soon developed into a distinctly urban art form. Through the support of the National Arts of Tanzania (NAT), Tingatinga regularly sold his paintings and began to teach his technique to students.

The traditional Tinga Tinga style of painting most often depicted the native fauna and flora of Tanzania, rendered in both a naïve and surrealistic style on single-colored backgrounds. Due to their availability, masonite substrates and highly-saturated, brilliantly colored industrial paints were used to create the artwork. Current Tinga Tinga painters now paint a variety of subject themes on stretched muslim and canvas. Many of these artists still uphold the traditional use of bicycle enamel paints.

Edward Tingatinga, who had established himself as a successful artist, was shot in 1972 by police in a case of mistaken identity during the officers’ search for a gang of bank robbers. He died at the age of forty years on the way to the hospital. Six-year old Daudi Tingatinga and his younger sister Martina were left in the care of their mother, Agatha. Growing up in a state of poverty, neither sibling received any formal education. Edward Tingatinga’s fellow artists formed the Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative in his honor; this cooperative later became a school for artists from Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar. The traditional art form of Tinga Tinga was passed onto Daudi and Martina by their uncle Salum Mussa, known as “Mzee Lumumba”, who had received his art education from their father.

Notes: The Tingatinga Arts Cooperative Society website is located at: https://tingatinga.ch/en/about.php

An article entitled “Tinga Tinga: An African Tale” written by feature editor Kate Bystrova for the Commonwealth Secretariat’s independent magazine, “Global: The International Briefing”, can be located at: https://www.global-briefing.org/2014/09/tinga-tinga-an-african-tale/

The Tinga Tinga Arts Cooperative has a biographical article on Edward Saidi Tingatinga in its January 2022 edition located at: https://www.tingatingaart.com/blogs/articles/edward-saidi-tingatinga

Top Insert Image: Jesper Kirknaes, “Edward Saidi Tingatinga”, Date Unknown, Color Print, January 2022 Issue of Tinga Tinga Art

Second Insert Image: Edward Saidi Tingatinga, “Le Lion”, 1971, Oil on Masonite, 61 x 71.5 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image, Edward Saidi Tingatinga, Untitled, Enamel on Board, 61 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Francis Gerard Dillon

The Paintings of Gerard Dillon

Born in Belfast in 1916, Francis Gerard Dillon was an Irish painter and designer. He was one of the most imaginative folk-inspired Irish painters of the twentieth-century. Except for a drawing class in London and a short period at the Belfast Art School in the early 1930s, Dillon was a self-taught artist who developed his own particular style.

Interested in art, film and theater since childhood, George Dillon left school at the age of fourteen and traveled to London. He supported himself with odd jobs during the early 1930s followed by a position with a London decorating firm from 1934 to 1939. Dillon began to paint in 1936 and frequently visited the Connemara region which played a major influence on his work. There he painted many landscapes and portraits of the local people working the land.

With the outbreak of World War II, Dillon returned to Belfast and, over the next five years, developed his skill as a painter in Dublin and Belfast. In 1942 with the support of his friend Mary Harriet “Mainie” Jellett, an early abstract painter and promoter of Irish modern art, he had his first solo exhibition at The Country Shop in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. The paintings in the show, “Father Forgive Them Their Sins”, were focused on his concerns over the new war in Europe.

Beginning in 1943, Gerard Dillon was a regular contributor and committee member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Founded by Mary Jellett, it was a yearly exhibition of Irish abstract expressionism and avant-garde art that challenged the traditionalist Irish art movements supported by the Royal Hibernian Academy and National College of Art. In 1944, Dillon presented his work alongside the work of fellow Belfast painter George Campbell at painter John Lamb’s Portadown Gallery.

Dillon relocated to London in 1945; however, he continued to return to Connemara in the late 1940s and during the 1950s so he could paint in his favorite town of Roundstone. In 1951, Dillon was introduced to Belfast painter Noreen Rice, who was also a self-taught artist of surrealistic and primitive style. For the support and guidance given in her early career, Noreen Rice would regard both Dillon and George Campbell as her mentors for decades.

In the late 1950s Gerard Dillon moved away from landscape painting and moved into complete abstraction. He was surrounded by the abstract expressionist movement and exposed to works by Mark Rothko, William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Antonio Tàpies and Asger Jorn, all of whom were exhibiting at the Tate. It is possible that collage artist and painter Richard Hamilton, while staying with Dillon in London in 1950s, influenced Dillon who began working with collage, found objects, and repetitions of color and patterns for large-scale composition pieces. After moving to Dublin, Dillon received a double honor in 1958 with his representation of Ireland at New York City’s Guggenheim International Exhibition and his representation of Great Britain at Pittsburg’s International Exhibition.

Dillon’s three brothers tragically passed away within quick succession of one another between 1962 and 1966. This traumatic period gravely affected his state of mind; Dillon’s work turned into a form of escapist art as he tried to cope with the loss. Throughout this period he returned continuously to the motif of the clown and the figure of Pierrot, a theme also explored by other artists in the Ulster group. At the end of the 1960s, there was a pronounced shift in Dillon’s work. The impact of his loss followed by suffering a stroke in 1967 affected his artistic output. The reoccurring motifs of clown and Pierrot became submerged in surreal, fantastical landscapes and geometric patterns. Dillon was also struggling with finding a way to express his sexuality. His deep interest in self-analysis developed a series of symbolic motifs, most often masked figures, which came to represent himself within his art.

Gerard Dillon continued his painting, made tapestries, and designed theatrical sets and costumes for playwright Seán O’Casey’s 1968 “Juno and the Paycock”. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Dillon withdrew his work from the Belfast branch of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art; however, he also gave work for gallery owner Sheelagh Flannigan’s October 1969 exhibition supporting relief for the victims of the Belfast riots. During his last years of illness, Francis Gerard Dillon continued to be actively involved in a children’s art workshop at Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. On the 14th of June in 1971, he died of a second stroke at the age of fifty-five. Dillon’s grave, as requested, is unmarked in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery.

Note: Gerard Dillon was both a homosexual and a religious man. There is one entry in his diary of a homosexual encounter that resulted in a sense of guilt; that incident aside, there is no other empirical evidence concerning encounters in his life. Karen Reihill, the author of “Gerard Dillon: Art and Friendships”, points to a probable love on Dillon’s part for the painter Daniel O’Neill, another self-taught artist from Belfast who, along with Dillon and George Campbell, was a member of a small artists’ colony in Conlig, County Down. Reihill also pointed to Dillon’s association with two members of the modernist White Stag Group: British painters Basil Rákóczi, who was known to be bisexual, and Kenneth Hall, who was homosexual.

Top Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Pen and Ink Drawing on Paper, 16.5 x 11.4 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Hole in the Hill”, circa 1959, Mixed Media and Collage, 45 x 59 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gerard Dillon, “Self Portrait with Pierrot and Nude”, circa 1960s, Oil on Board, National Gallery of Ireland

Bottom Insert Image: Gerard Dillion, “Marine Movement”, Date Unknown, Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 x 51 cm, Private Collection