Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - David de Belle
Article 11 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the December 14, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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Capturing the Mystery
There is a mysterious, beckoning quality to the watercolours of David de Belle, at once both familiar and arresting. With spare, deft strokes, his paintings evoke a mood of reverie, drawing the viewer into an eternal landscape - be it a tall pine mirrored in a northern lake or a narrow street scene in old Quebec City. We have all been there, we know these places and yet somehow David de Belle captures the mystery at the heart of seeing.
Born in Montreal in 1934, David began sketching as a young boy - heir to his grandfather's artistic gifts; Charles Ernest de Belle, a contemporary of the Group of Seven, has six paintings in the National Gallery. Architectural studies at McGill honed David's ability to draw, and for a while he toyed with the idea of painting full-time. For two years he studied life drawing at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art where Arthur Lismer showed him how much fun it was to draw - not work at all!
However, the perennial struggle between art and financial necessity soon decided David's future. As a young Project Architect, he went on to design some of the early stages of Expo 67, including Habitat with his classmate Moshe Safdie. Then he took off on a road trip, with his young family throughout the States and Canada. Upon return returning to Ottawa, he opened his own firm, which grew to 28 architects, from 1969-76. After further travel and international projects, he took a position in 1984 with Public Works Canada, where he was responsible for CSIS Headquarters and the National Archives in Gatineau. In 1985 he moved to Larrimac where he has lived ever since - with a two year stint upon retiring to travel back and forth between Chelsea and Iqaluit to participate in the creation of Nunavut.
A member of Galerie Old Chelsea from 1998, David now paints full-time. He has been inspired by two workshops with one of Canada's top watercolour artists, Charles Spratt, but he is essentially self-taught. "There is some mystery I am after, some story in every painting that I am trying to convey. It is the initial thought process that matters looking deeply at the scene, then asking what is the best way to capture its essence. I start with a value sketch - drawing in what's light and what's dark, leaving out enough to let the viewer complete it with his imagination. Often this sketch is the best thing I do. I may not even go on to do a finished painting. There is some physic charge that is released, some immediacy that tells me I've caught what I am after.
"I love to paint. I love to share my work, to put forth how I see the world. But selling is not the point. That is the worst part of being an artist - the pressure to sell. When I turned 70 my wife gave me a violin. It is so uplifting to learn how to play - it is like painting, I play for the joy of it, as I paint for the joy of it. I am totally absorbed in trying to express the mystery and beauty of what I see."