Belgium Village Artwork

Belgium is a country of old brick towns folded along slow water, and its painters have always turned back to them, setting up in a doorway to paint the same rooftops their grandfathers grew up under. Found in Le Perche and dating to the 20th century, it is an oil of one such village, a huddle of tall houses with green shutters and a chimney above them, a band of water running along the foreground, signed in the lower corner and held in a gilt frame. The paint is worked on thick, built up in ridges that catch the light where a flatter hand would have left the wall smooth, the kind of surface you only get from a painter with real feeling for the place. Sylvie hangs it low over a writing desk or a stack of books on a console, close enough that the ridges of paint catch the lamplight in the evening.

 

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