ACADEMIC BACKGROUND
Let François tell you himself how he gained his enormously comprehensive knowledge about painting technique and especially about aesthetics:
Both my father and his older brother Jozef studied at the Lucas Akademie in Ghent. My father sculpture and Jozef painting. And there was his cousin Achilles Lammens, a celebrated expressionist. This must have been a lucky influence, firstly in developing my unstoppable love for drawing and secondly for teaching me the “academic” way.
Good luck came my way by having an excellent art teacher at the Oefenschool van de Staatsnormal School who exhibited my drawings. Talking about good luck: in the class I had two classmates who became full-time artists, who proved their talent. One, Gaston Van Den Eynde, won the “Prize of Rome” for designing the best posters for SABENA – the then Belgian national international airline company. The other one, Pierre Vlerick, whose paintings created sensitive and nostalgic evocations of nature. He is now represented in the MUSEUM VAN HEDENDAAGSE KUNST in Ghent, who Joseph BEUYS does not hesitate to call the best art museum in Europe. I remember how we looked upon ourselves as the “three artists” in the class.
In 1939 when Pierre enrolled at the AKADEMIE VOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN, I asked my father to let me join him. My father refused this and told me I must study business. Artists starve, he said! For the next five years I studied business science. You guessed it: I did not neglect my love for art.
ART IS IN MY BLOOD! Thousands of sketches and hundreds of paintings are proof hereof.
As time rolled on I learned tenfold about art than I would have learned at the AKADEMIE VOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN, the reputable Flemish academy.
How did I do that? Simple. I have had the best English and American art-teachers by studying their books, which I borrowed from the art library or which I bought to build my own library of “How to”, of biographies and of histories. All this in addition to experience gained in Belgium and in South Africa. In Ghent I visited frequently the Vyncke-van Eyck Art Gallery where I got under the influence of the best Expressionists, especially PERMEKE and then there were the unforgettable visits to what Jozeph BEUYS does not hesitate to call the best art museum in Europe: the MUSEUM VAN HEDENDAAGSE KUNST (walking distance from my home!)
To be added, is my making friends with writers and painters and – last but not least – my father's and my uncle Jozef's teaching.
All this makes me the autodidact I am happy to be!