User:Walter de rycke/sandbox

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Walter De Rycke was as a child already possessed by what his great teacher Octave Landuyt would call the "real" things, as a child he constantly looked for artifacts with a story, with a patina, for things that were made by hand. Although Walter De Rycke completed his study as a regent in plastic arts and later attained a master's degree in ceramics, he is still mainly a self-taught artist or he is a man who has been able to communicate with some great personalities for the sake of an artistic obsession and because of his extraordinary erudition. Living in the centre of the lives of his three young children the home of Walter De Rycke is a true temple for the study of art brut and Surrealism, the house is filled with plants and study-objects that recall a road that runs through the whole of Europe and where Walter De Rycke was nourished by the most alienating contacts. Giving the names of these meetings would be exhaustive and presumptuous, but his ceramics and mixed-media drawings are tested by very authentical masters and teachers, sometimes very big names where he apprenticed himself or where a friendship was created, some of them street artists, marginalized people, misunderstood geniuses, Walter De Rycke has always fed himself with the fire within the other, that can be an anonymous master within the animist art, but it could also be a child that putted his first dreams on paper at the academy where he taught, especially to adults. for more than 40 years Walter De Rycke has been a life long surrounded by poets, musicians, by art-collectors, by rare books and by an archive that has been increasing over time. Even before the fall of the wall, he pushed deep into the old USSR, where he went to see those artists who's work he had discovered in books that he found in the major European cities. As a ceramicist Walter De Rycke is extremely authentical, his work interrogates with that of Jan Heylen, Jean Dubuffet and Octave Landuyt, but despite his virtuosity it is essentially familiar with a beautiful child's drawing or a powerful outsider art piece or with a loaded doll from the shamanic tradition. Walter De Rycke was written about by Dr. Karel Ringoet (VUB), by professor William Elias (VUB) and professor Hubert Dethier (VUB), by Dr. Michel Hallers (ULB), but Walter De Rycke mainly found recognition by other artists on the international level who have been discovering his works the last decade by the new media. The journey of discovery has become increasingly broader and every day brings a new adventure and the fire that was in the young artist and within in the young child that has searched for treasures within the attics, the basements and warehouses of relatives, that fire swells to become even more powerful, Walter De Rycke works every day, between his students and alone, from beneath his impressive beard he says softly: "Picasso died while he was working on his last painting."