Technical Information

What will you find here?

In these technical pages, I explain the most important technical aspects of painting in oils in general, and of my paintings in particular.

So you’ll find information about the supports, the methods — particularly those of the Ancient Masters — , the mediums, the pigments (and their permanence), etc.

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The methods of the Old Masters

Technically speaking, my paintings are inspired by a combination of the methods of the Italian painters of the Quattrocento and above all those of the Old Flemish Masters of the beginning of the XVth century, particularly the Brothers Hubert and John Van Eyck.

Actually, everyone can go and see the museums e.g. in Florence and Rome (Italy), Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges (Belgium), among others. He will immediately be struck by the fact that the best preserved paintings are generally the older. The Old Italian and Flemish Masters knew very well how to make a painting which would brave the centuries, because they perfectly knew the materials they employed and how to handle them.

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How I came to guess their secret

During many years, I spend hours and hours in the museums and churches of Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, trying to penetrate the secret of the extraordinary preservation of the paintings of the Van Eyck’s and the Old Flemish Masters (it wasn’t difficult for me because I lived in Belgium).

I also studied conscientiously the most outstanding books about every technical aspects of artistic paintings, among others the works of Cennino Cennini, Xavier de Langlais, Max Doerner, Rutherford J. Gettens & George L. Stout, Marc Havel, A.P. Laurie, Ralph Mayer, Daniel V. Thompson, and many others (see Bibliography).

I ran numerous trials trying to find out the secret of the brightnessness, the freshness and the preservability of the works of the Old Masters, but with a partial success only.

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The discovery

Eventually I had the good luck of meeting a French painter who knew the technique the old Flemish masters used for their upperpaintings in oil. This technique is not taught in the art schools and academies of arts, nor in the technical books on painting. He had learned it from a Belgian master, who himself had learned it from another one, and so on.

We became friends and he taught me this wonderful technique which permits to obtain a quality of the last paint layers that’s unobtainable by any other mean.

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Further technical information

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