Some thoughts on Painting. Academy-students in China asked me: " How can we be free in our head ? " I believe one can be free through discipline. Real freedom can only survive protected by a cage. The cage is the stubborn dayly work one performs. Freedom comes through the study of the great masters of the past and the present and by studying nature. This study is not passive and dull, it is the most exciting thing in the world. It offers a way to guide the enthusiasm and energy of life. Slowly one becomes what one is. Painting is a dance, chaotic and precise. One dances oneself out of the image. The traces of that dance form the image. Painting is " to be and not to be " in the same moment. A painter is a hunted hunter. As a hunter one tries to track down the image that one feels and sees,at the same time one is obsessed and hunted by that image. A work of art can have the beauty of a grenade: tense, inviting to be touched and caressed by eye and hand, with an inner power that can explode the world in a split-second.

Tastes like a needle There's a loneliness it tastes like a needle you swallow it penetrates keeps you awake inside sharp as a searchlight.

Bada Sharen : alive and kicking "Flowers by a river" : twelve magic meters Every day I meet him, he is the cloud in the water and the little bridge, he is fishes and trees and he's the ducks, especially the eyes of the ducks. Walking towards my studio I pass through this small landscape, Bada Shanren lives in it the way Titian lives in the wrinkled leather of a used glove. But Bada has frustration as aphrodisiac, anger and aggression are his companions, embedded in the deep black ink that makes the water flow in this handscroll. Water of choice : alive and flowing or deadstill. Producing and absorbing live, mean mother, "stopping pond". Swim or drown ? "Flowers by a river" is the trace of Bada's struggle with the Black Angel, Bada's "To be or not to be" in al it's visual majesty. Three centuries separate bamboo from steel : Bada bows, Staël breaks. Samouraï ? Yes. Supreme master of the brush ? Absolutely. Kamikaze ? Almost. Like Gericault lethaly romantic, Bada Sharen manipulates time, he is the pacemaker, attacks the spectator in the eye. To see the totality of this handscroll unrolled is experiencing all of Proust's lost time condensed into one moment. This is his visual blitzkrieg, slow and fast every instant he occupies new territory, eye after eye, conscience after conscience he wins the world. Today he wants you. Finally "Flowers by a river" is a demonstration piece, it shows an absolute master dancing out of the way of his brush, giving ink free time in space, 12m x 45cm. Incredibly true, luxurious sensuality from the deepest blacks upto nearly untouched white. All Diabelli is there, all Goldberg too, variation of variations. The speed of night cuts the light, freezes the moment. The ink flows in the rhythm of a wild heart, impersonal and as free as a decision taking hold over a man. Charged with Ulysses final "Yes". Truth travels by lizard by pain electrically in vain. Jan Van Mechelen

fur of rain Once eccentricity was shocking , now only quality can knock you out. Naked quality ,a visible child in the cold , young and haughty crawling around what once were the walls of paradise Trembling in it's fur of rain . Mastered by the word , he stammers like a steamship . Sunt nobis mitia poma . Thou shalt honour . In terms of .

Winterreise. Froideur du voyageur tout vue tout vécu sans cesse cette lumière intérieur hurle loup blanc enragé.

The country I live in The country I live in is the name I carry nuclear small atomic it stretches from the skin on my back into the black starry void the country I live in twinkles and ten thousand light years later if later then still answers to When ? a child by the seaside at night kisses the light I emited .