Homework Until Midnight and ‘One Detail a Week’: An Obscure Art School Keeps a Forgotten Style Alive | art

HeyLast February morning, in a cold studio in Brussels, 28 people in white coats gathered to watch Sylvie van der Keelen paint the sky. “The first touch of the brush is generally the best,” Van der Kelen said as the light pink clouds began to appear. “It is best not to make any modifications.”

For a few days this winter I was allowed to attend classes at the Van der Keelen-Louglan School, a legendary drawing school in Brussels unlike any other art education institution in the world. Run by the same family since its founding in 1892, Van der Kelen Stadium is held every winter under its glass and wrought-iron roof, extending from the back of a Gothic brick townhouse.

Students must arrive by 9 a.m., otherwise they will be closed until lunchtime; They should not bring phones or cameras into the school workplace; They must wear white lab coats while working; They must work in silence. They also have to be able to withstand the cold: the studio is inefficiently heated by an old wood-burning stove called a “la mama,” an old metal contraption placed near the entrance.

If students can tolerate these constraints, by the end of the six-month course they will possess a number of specialist skills, from drawing signs and lettering to using gold and silver leaf, and manipulating textural finishes. However, the core of the course – and what the school is most known for – is illusion drawing techniques.

Trompe l’oeil literally translates as “to trick the eye,” and refers to a type of illusion painting dating back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, in which artists use textures, shading, and perspective tricks in order to create three-dimensional illusions. At Van der Kelen, students learn to evoke relief sculptures and architectural details from flat surfaces. created reproductions, in oils, of 28 different wood grains and 33 different types of marble; And like a selfie, create the perfect optical illusion sky. (Tip: Clouds are rarely round, more often “elongated like a human body shape.”)

When Sylvie’s grandfather Alfred van der Keelen founded it, it capitalized on the style’s popularity in the late 19th century: dozens of house painters graduated with careers in high-paying decorative painting ahead of them. But in the twenty-first century, the school finds itself facing existential challenges. The passion for decorative painting among the affluent upper middle class had evaporated, and optical illusions went out of style in interior decoration and high art. In contrast, student numbers have fallen to dangerously low levels.

Yet every winter, the family continues to supervise a course that has barely changed since 1892, and students still flock from all over the world to put themselves through a strange and sometimes punishing routine (“There’s about one break every week,” one student told me). What maintains the school’s prestige — and why do so many aspiring artists still find their way to this cold Brussels studio here?

“Everyone is looking for something special here,” Sylvie told me after her demonstration that morning as the students quietly prepared for work. “Everyone is here for a reason.”

This year marks the first time that Sylvie, 52, has taken over the running of the school from her mother Denise – the “Coco Chanel of artificial marble” – who has been in charge since 1995. (Although she officially retired last year, the 82-year-old known to students as ‘Madame’ remains a presence at the school, regularly traveling to the workshop to offer advice. Her comments range from the practical – ‘She says too many white accents,’ ‘It’s too much.’) To indirect statements “Sometimes the wind blows longer,” I heard her say to a student.)

With Denise’s help, Sylvie oversees a schedule that hasn’t changed much since the start of school. Students must attend the workshop from 9am to 6pm five days a week, half-day on Saturday. Every morning, a new technique is demonstrated by a member of the Van der Kellens family (the school invites outside teachers to teach additional classes, but only family members teach the basic optical illusion course). Students observe and take notes, before producing an exact copy themselves on a large sheet of paper; This piece of work is known as a ‘painting’.

However, no painting can be finished in one day, because each requires multiple “processes”: different working stages, separated by a day or more to allow the paints and varnishes to dry. As a result, students end up with a surprising number of paintings in progress at any given time, with more added each morning. Even after the workshop closes at 6pm, everyone has homework, sometimes until midnight. “It’s brutal,” one student, a British painter, told me. “Every day you learn something new, and just when you think you’re good at it, another committee arrives to stop you.”

Why would anyone put themselves through this? When I spoke with this year’s group, I heard a number of reasons. There is a small but important group of people from various professions – architects, graphic designers, interior designers – who have become dissatisfied with the computer-based nature of their industry and are looking for something more practical. After graduation, students may hope to find work as painting assistants for well-known artists, painting interiors for wealthy clients, working on film or theater sets, or working for European fashion houses that are periodically drawn to the optical illusion aesthetic of fashion shows and boutiques.

However, every student from an arts background I speak to cites the work of another painter, Lucy Mackenzie, who has arguably done more to revive the school’s fortunes than anyone else in recent times. The young artist from Glasgow was wandering through a used bookstore in Brussels in 2007 when she came across a mention of the school in an interior design book, and was amazed that such a place still existed – she joined immediately. At the time, Mackenzie was nearly a decade into an already successful artistic career, but she signed on because she found the techniques of the Illusory School fascinating: for her, they were connected to “deep human connections between carnivals, fairgrounds and markets”, in contrast to the “resistant and hermetic” nature of much contemporary art at the time.

By midyear, the school was in crisis. Class sizes have declined: no more than 10 or 11 students, down from more than 100 at the interwar peak. All the competitors had closed their doors, and it seemed as if the school, and the unique skills it taught, were destined to go the same way.

It was not until Mackenzie used the school’s techniques to create evocative, large-scale paintings, such as the dizzying Untitled (2010), as well as a book she published about her time at the school, that it was works like these—on view at Tate Britain in London, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and the Art Institute of Chicago—that caused a steadily increasing stream of students to arrive at van der Kelen’s imposing wooden doors. “Lucy McKenzie has a lot to answer for,” one student said to me cheerfully as he thought about the hard work ahead of him.

Sylvie van der Kelen believes that the skills and techniques taught by her family come and go in fashion according to 40-year cycles. The vessel was in great demand in the 1920s and 1930s, and then again in the 1970s and 1980s, but by the mid-2000s, Van der Kelen was, as Sylvie puts it, “considered a bit of a dusty thing.” However, in the past decade, there has been a growing interest again in optical illusions and decorative painting – including a major exhibition at the Met on Cubism and optical illusions, and a number of young artists exploring the possibilities of this form.

The fluctuating fortunes of the school mirror those of trompe l’oeil as a literary genre. Sometimes the technique was viewed as the highest art form – an ambition of the ancient Greeks and Renaissance painters – and at other times it was called a cheap “deception”, as John Ruskin wrote in 1843.

Often dismissed as a ‘popular’ art form, it also seems to be coming back into fashion among the rich in times of great inequality – in recent years, Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Acne Studios have all experimented with optical illusion-inspired illusions in their collections.

Directed criticism It can also be said that optical illusions and decorative-style painting – otherwise inaccessible or outdated – can be settled at the Van der Keelen School itself, an entity that has resisted change since its founding, for a fee of €13,750 (tools and materials included). (McKenzie says that a large number of her students were simply “posh kids who loved art but didn’t want to go to art school.”) Should the school be dismissed as a reactionary institution, a relic of another era?

“That would be reductive,” says McKenzie, arguing that Van der Keelen, for all her idiosyncrasies, “is a national treasure. She should be protected by UNESCO. Aspects of her identity are discreet, but ‘complaints about the appalling modern world’ are not the kind of thing they make. You get the skills and do what you want with them. I took it personally and did everything I could, and I’m still trying.”

For Sylvie and her mother, their work is important as a way to “preserve these techniques,” many of which are not taught anywhere else. Most importantly, there is the joy that comes from seeing students — “my kids,” Sylvie calls them — develop into skilled artists every winter. “They all discover something in themselves while working here,” Denise tells me.

As for the future of the school, the week I visit is half term, Sylvie’s 10-year-old son Hilaire can be seen playing with pieces of wood and marble around the balcony, as Sylvie used to do. “My father’s life was students and the workshop, nothing else,” she recalls.

Sylvie worked as an archaeologist before taking over the school, studying some of the oldest examples of optical illusions from around the world, in ancient Egypt and on the walls of villas in Pompeii. She is adamant that she was always sure she would return to the family business. What about Hillier?

“Sometimes he says he wants to take the job, sometimes he doesn’t,” she says.

“It’s a really cool job he’s going to learn,” says Dennis, more than certain of what his future will hold. “I think he will be convinced.”