Art is a product of (creative) mind.
Eric G. C. Weets
Creativity is a combinatorial force — it thrives on cross-pollinating existing ideas, often across divergent disciplines and sensibilities, and combining them into something new, into what we proudly call our “original” creations. Paul Rand
Eric G. C. Weets
Creativity is a combinatorial force — it thrives on cross-pollinating existing ideas, often across divergent disciplines and sensibilities, and combining them into something new, into what we proudly call our “original” creations. Paul Rand
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Eric G. C. Weets is born on 3rd August 1951, in Merksem, Belgium. He is a self taught, multidisciplinary, contemporary artist.
Weets has no academic training. It was denied when he was young and later, when he was old enough and had a chance, he refused because by then he read a lot about art and came to believe that formal training can destroy creativity.
Basically, to get where Weets is now, he really did teach himself by studying everything he could. He has painted from landscapes and portraits, extreme figurative and hyper realist to surrealist paintings and all the known “isms”, till almost pure abstract art. He also has studied in depth, especially the works of Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Gauguin, Cezanne, Bosch, Goya, the Flemish primitives, Ensor and so on.
Because of his curious nature, right from childhood he kept himself occupied with art history, ancient history (from the Babylon to the Greeks, Romans till the dark middle ages) and later on, as a teenager he got interested in Ancient, Asian and South American cultures. He read philosophies and biographies - from Aristotle to Nitzsche. From the Roman Emperors to Napoleon and he is quite good informed about the 1st and 2nd world wars (thanks to his growing up with his grandparents where the war stories were still fresh in their minds and were exchanged on almost daily basis) On top of that he also got interested for a while, in religion, the paranormal and everything esoteric. Music is one of his other big passions. To keep it short, it is difficult to say what DIDN'T interest and influence Weets. The only thing he was never much into reading was fiction, with the exception of fairy tales.
To explain what all has influenced Weets is impossible to write down in a couple of paragraphs because of all his experiences and experiments with life. He has built up such a mountain of data in his mind and all this has influenced/is influencing him in one way or the other, to create his paintings.
After spending many years of studying and experimenting in various mediums, to overcome the insecurity and inferiority complex of not having any academic background, Weets came to believe that anybody can learn how to paint but the most important thing, WHAT to put on canvas, cannot be taught. Only the ones who go beyond the difficult and can discipline themselves to understand intuition, will be able to go there, where unique works are created.
When Weets started working on his black and white series of paintings in the year 2007, he pictured the past and present. At the moment, Weets believes he paints, intuitively, the future. Weets thinks colors distract. Just black and white is direct, honest and the figures can be put as and how they come to him - straight from the mind.
It is only when you look at the originals, you will understand that these works are masterpieces of the 21st century, created by a genius, who has managed to enter the subconscious by deep meditation and has captured the journey on canvas, without letting his own ego interfere in the process.
Weets' quest to create timeless work, made him negate all his other works on canvas, prior to the year 2007. Because he felt those works miss that something, which makes the work exceptional, original and thereby timeless. Consequently, all the works presented here are from the year 2007.
A brush to Weets is like a pen to a writer. As soon as he picks up the brush he is teleported to this other, his world, getting totally immersed in it. Weets’ dedication and patience is commendable and endearing. He is gracefully enduring the obstacles he is facing in each moment of his living day and almost dying nights.
Presently, Weets has retired from public life completely and is almost living in solitude. In the meantime it is I, who mediate on his behalf, with the outside world.
These paintings are about the purity of unbounded thoughts, most probably more subconscious than conscious, than a painting painted in a classical way. I feel these works have to be seen, enjoyed and thought about, if only to gain a different perspective on ordinary, daily living. And is not that, the purpose of art?
Filomina Pawar
August 2011
Eric G. C. Weets is born on 3rd August 1951, in Merksem, Belgium. He is a self taught, multidisciplinary, contemporary artist.
Weets has no academic training. It was denied when he was young and later, when he was old enough and had a chance, he refused because by then he read a lot about art and came to believe that formal training can destroy creativity.
Basically, to get where Weets is now, he really did teach himself by studying everything he could. He has painted from landscapes and portraits, extreme figurative and hyper realist to surrealist paintings and all the known “isms”, till almost pure abstract art. He also has studied in depth, especially the works of Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Gauguin, Cezanne, Bosch, Goya, the Flemish primitives, Ensor and so on.
Because of his curious nature, right from childhood he kept himself occupied with art history, ancient history (from the Babylon to the Greeks, Romans till the dark middle ages) and later on, as a teenager he got interested in Ancient, Asian and South American cultures. He read philosophies and biographies - from Aristotle to Nitzsche. From the Roman Emperors to Napoleon and he is quite good informed about the 1st and 2nd world wars (thanks to his growing up with his grandparents where the war stories were still fresh in their minds and were exchanged on almost daily basis) On top of that he also got interested for a while, in religion, the paranormal and everything esoteric. Music is one of his other big passions. To keep it short, it is difficult to say what DIDN'T interest and influence Weets. The only thing he was never much into reading was fiction, with the exception of fairy tales.
To explain what all has influenced Weets is impossible to write down in a couple of paragraphs because of all his experiences and experiments with life. He has built up such a mountain of data in his mind and all this has influenced/is influencing him in one way or the other, to create his paintings.
After spending many years of studying and experimenting in various mediums, to overcome the insecurity and inferiority complex of not having any academic background, Weets came to believe that anybody can learn how to paint but the most important thing, WHAT to put on canvas, cannot be taught. Only the ones who go beyond the difficult and can discipline themselves to understand intuition, will be able to go there, where unique works are created.
When Weets started working on his black and white series of paintings in the year 2007, he pictured the past and present. At the moment, Weets believes he paints, intuitively, the future. Weets thinks colors distract. Just black and white is direct, honest and the figures can be put as and how they come to him - straight from the mind.
It is only when you look at the originals, you will understand that these works are masterpieces of the 21st century, created by a genius, who has managed to enter the subconscious by deep meditation and has captured the journey on canvas, without letting his own ego interfere in the process.
Weets' quest to create timeless work, made him negate all his other works on canvas, prior to the year 2007. Because he felt those works miss that something, which makes the work exceptional, original and thereby timeless. Consequently, all the works presented here are from the year 2007.
A brush to Weets is like a pen to a writer. As soon as he picks up the brush he is teleported to this other, his world, getting totally immersed in it. Weets’ dedication and patience is commendable and endearing. He is gracefully enduring the obstacles he is facing in each moment of his living day and almost dying nights.
Presently, Weets has retired from public life completely and is almost living in solitude. In the meantime it is I, who mediate on his behalf, with the outside world.
These paintings are about the purity of unbounded thoughts, most probably more subconscious than conscious, than a painting painted in a classical way. I feel these works have to be seen, enjoyed and thought about, if only to gain a different perspective on ordinary, daily living. And is not that, the purpose of art?
Filomina Pawar
August 2011
Quotes by Weets.
- I needed 2/3rd of my life time to know how and what to create and become unique in that one discipline.
- I would like to put so much on one painting that there is nothing left to see anymore.
-An almost unnatural compulsion to draw, is the base to create a masterpiece.
-Almost a whole lifetime I thought about how to make unique paintings : never done before.
-Time and again, I noticed that in my large paintings hundreds of smaller paintings lay undetected: maybe it is time to enlarge them individually.
-What I do not like at all is that more than 1/3rd of my work is rolled in tubes or stacked against each other because of lack of space: even though I have large enough living space.
-Basically, to get where I am now, I really did teach myself by studying everything I could.
-I have spent many canvases and thereby many years in perfecting my technique to prove that I am as good as any art graduate, when it goes about painting technique.
-I miss out on having exhibitions, networking, reviews of my work because I am unable to get out of the house and meet people in person.
-It is not the way you paint but how your mind decides what to paint, that’s of importance.
-Emotions of joy, pain, sadness, frustrations, escatsy etc are very personal illusions and therefore not easy to explain to others in sentences built up with separate words. Words do not leave enough space for imagination and to explain emotions, one needs lot of imagination; not only from the side of the artist, who tries to translate feelings in pictures but also from the spectator, who has to put in his own efforts and open his mind, without prejudging, if he wants to understand an art work.
-The paintings I make for myself, I worked out in my head. The paintings I make for people to see, on canvas.
- I wanted to capture the passing thoughts or rather fragments of thoughts as, when and how they occur, on the canvas, without or as less as possible interfering in the process.
-Paint is one of the best mediums to project what is hidden in the mind.
-I hide my feelings in the heads of the figures I paint.
- From the time Mr. Cave man imprinted his hands on the walls of his cave, he invented religion, started philosophizing, created art, from that moment Homosapien became the ruler of the earth.
-Without art we were, most probably, still in the same state as our fellow primates.
-In my paintings I can tell my truth without offending family, friends or neighbors.
- I exercise absolute self criticism and self censorship and that is the reason why it has taken me so long to achieve satisfaction for myself, at least in the painting medium and show my creations, because the most important criteria I look in any art, is Originality.
-It is in the year 2007 that am I more or less sure that I found my personal, unique way to express myself.
-I am depicting the impression about the world I am living in.
- Sometimes I have a clear picture of what I want to draw but most of the time I start somewhere with a random form and from there on, I draw whatever comes to my mind.
-When an artist starts repeating himself, it is then time for him to retire.
-You may say that 80% of my drawings are a kind of automatism.
-The subconscious has the habit to contradict itself.
- What decides that something becomes a masterpiece is not how difficult it was to make it but the end result.
-One principle can be just equally right as the contradiction of that principle.
-Never say yes because it takes away the opportunity to say no.
-The subconscious is loaded with past and present experiences. The more you experience, the richer the subconscious becomes.
- How do I decide the price of an original painting, I know, I never will be able to redo.
-The artist is only the medium between the world of thoughts and the visual realization.
-The wall you display a painting on, is just so important as the painting itself.
-My paintings can be seen as remarks and notes written down with a brush on canvas, when traveling through beautiful and awful fragments of memories of long forgotten happenings and worlds not known by me before.
-If you concentrate on my work, you will be transferred to a world you never dreamt of.
- It is my belief that I cannot paint what I have never seen before and so I am able to create new objects and entities out of what I have seen, from my young and the adult life. You will find in my work everything that plays a part in daily reality, including childhood beliefs carried unconsciously into the adult mind and more conscious experiences, learned by observation and study.
-A visitor told me recently that my painting stare at him. He said he never have had such an experience before.
-I have studied in depth, especially the works of Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Gauguin, Cezanne, Bosch, Goya, the Flemish primitives, Ensor.
-My paintings stare at you, to invite you to stare back.
-My paintings are not made to decorate the walls but to give you the pleasure of entering the non existence.
-I came to believe that formal training can destroy creativity.
-What I do in my work, is just the opposite of simplifying. I try to put so much I can on one painting.
-Sometimes I wonder, who made my paintings because I also do not always understand what is going on.
-I don't judge my work because I can't take enough distance from it.
-If the artist’s creation is not greater than the artist, it is not art.
-My paintings tell you that there is more than what you see around.
-My works give you a glimpse beyond wall of ignorance.
-It took me a lot of time to make the paintings and drawings so I expect that the viewer too takes time out to watch my work.
-Inspiration is not the problem, time and energy sometimes is.
-I paint, create sound and make moving pictures because it is the only way I am able to justify my existence.
-Expressing myself in drawing is my way of entering the subconscious.
-I keep the flow of creativity going on in my works, by keeping the conscious mind busy with good music.
-I am almost sure that everything I draw has a symbolic meaning but that does not mean that I also understand where it goes about.
- Basically, there are no rules in making art, artists have to make their own rules. I make my own rules and stand by them.
-Life is so bizarre that if it was not so painful, we could laugh at it.
-Painting is so important to me that I sometimes forget that it has no meaning for some others.
-The direct line and a minimum of basic colors are the best ways to approach the subconscious with.
-The more I keep my mind away from the drawing, the easier drawing becomes.
-I have to admit to the fact that it’s very much an innate urge in me to paint/draw and go on painting/drawing.
- My paintings, specially the big ones, are stories without a beginning or an end.
-I make big compositions in my trademark pictorial language, overflowing with symbolism and enriched with creatures and creations, arising out of the subconscious.
- My paintings are under the influence of gravity but what is on the painting, not necessarily.
- I only need a brush, paint and canvas to create a whole world.
-I don’t paint what I see but what I feel.
-If I have to explain my works verbally, then I have failed miserably in executing my job as an art painter.
-In my paintings I show the complexity of the mind.
-If I would have given the figures some breathing space, then I risked that they become meaningless, lonely creatures because they lost the surrounding which created them.
-Black and white is the most simple, most pure, most clear and holds mysticism in it. Black and white is direct and honest. When the black paint or ink touches the surface of the canvas, it cannot be removed, even mistakes cannot be repaired. All what the hand draws comes straightaway out of the subconscious and there I leave it. What came up, is what you see. All that I can do afterwards such as repairing or coloring is too much thought about and that is what I just want to avoid. I want to stay true to the original source.
-The difference between art and craft is: craft is something you fill your day with; Art is an unstoppable inner urge, which occupies your life.”
- A lot of the misery in the world is because of the fact that everybody wants the best for himself and his offspring. -When the brain dies the mind dies, because the brain is the instrument that the mind needs to operate. This is logical, no. - I do not like to believe, but I have almost no choice but to believe in telepathy, -Revolution means that in a violent way a bunch of idiots is replaced by a set of the same.
- If you demand less from life than life has to offer you, you will become a happy person.
-My whole life I have collected experiences from as far as my imagination could reach.
-Life is a piece of art in itself. The more unique it is, the more value it has.
-Do not expect more from life than what life has to offer.
-I understood that the way I have to express myself, what I believe in, I could not do that in abstraction, in a normal figurative painting or expressionistic work, I had to find something else.
-My paintings are not made for people in a hurry.
-It takes a long time for me to make a painting, So, I expect from the audience that they too take good amount of time to absorb my work.
-To see what's on the other side, you need complete solitude and long periods of silence.
-It was much easier (for the artists) when there was nothing done yet. But now, we are 100 years further, in principle, from the experiment when the experiment first started. So, you can see the 100 years of experimentation before you and now your experiment comes on top of that". Surviving that is quite a challenge/could be a challenge.
-Going back, every time, to what already exists (in art), is, for me, simply trying to escape because you don’t know what to do new.
-What I do is new and the way I am doing it, by starting it from corner and let it simply happen, I create, I give an impression of our evolution. Evolution also started somewhere and it start happening and there is nobody who said how it had to go, where it had to go. It went the way it did because it had no other choice.
-What I do, can only be done, away from the noise of society.
-If you never have burnt one of your canvases, you are too kind to yourself, as an artist.
I thought of providing some information on Weets’ background from his early childhood: the circumstances which could have contributed in his development as an artist.
Eric G. C. Weets is born in 1951 in Merksem, Belgium. He grew up with his grandparents since the age of three. Like most children do, Weets too started scribbling on every possible surface as soon as he found something to draw with. Grandmother was not really happy with it and told him so. Weets then asked for paper. It was just to keep a child busy and she gave Weets albums of wall paper samples, available aplenty in the house and demanded that he use the plain side of these sheets for his drawings. Weets could draw as much as he wanted; grandmother was not against it because drawing kept Weets sitting at one place, engrossed in it for hours. That made it easier for her to keep an eye on Weets.
Weets is left handed and dyslexic and in 1957, these made his school life and resultantly, his whole childhood, utterly miserable. This must have supplemented his urge to draw and a chance to develop his visual vocabulary because then, Weets was able to tell his stories without letters being involved.
After learning art history during his teenage years, Weets wanted to create which has not been done before because he saw no point in copying or repeating something, if it could not be done better than what already exists. This quest for uniqueness has pushed him on, till he found something he could call original.
It took him almost his lifetime.
Filomina Pawar
Eric G. C. Weets is born in 1951 in Merksem, Belgium. He grew up with his grandparents since the age of three. Like most children do, Weets too started scribbling on every possible surface as soon as he found something to draw with. Grandmother was not really happy with it and told him so. Weets then asked for paper. It was just to keep a child busy and she gave Weets albums of wall paper samples, available aplenty in the house and demanded that he use the plain side of these sheets for his drawings. Weets could draw as much as he wanted; grandmother was not against it because drawing kept Weets sitting at one place, engrossed in it for hours. That made it easier for her to keep an eye on Weets.
Weets is left handed and dyslexic and in 1957, these made his school life and resultantly, his whole childhood, utterly miserable. This must have supplemented his urge to draw and a chance to develop his visual vocabulary because then, Weets was able to tell his stories without letters being involved.
After learning art history during his teenage years, Weets wanted to create which has not been done before because he saw no point in copying or repeating something, if it could not be done better than what already exists. This quest for uniqueness has pushed him on, till he found something he could call original.
It took him almost his lifetime.
Filomina Pawar