Interview with Arthur Devisscher
26.09.2024
The Bruges-based illustrator-artist Arthur Devisscher has already drawn together an impressive universe in his still young career.
Arthur graduated from the Luca School of Arts in Ghent in 2022, a place he had ended up at by mistake. ‘At eighteen, I didn't think of going to art school at all. Instead, I studied psychology.’ But drawing was in it from a very young age and reemerged while studying. Visiting the academy's open days felt like coming home. ‘I wanted to know what it feels like to be able to spend all day drawing. And not telling stories like in comics, because that didn't interest me. ’
For the artist, details have a special meaning; they are the key to depth and concentration. ‘Details make me concentrate even more and in this way remove myself even further from the world around me,’ he says. Looking around and becoming completely absorbed in his surroundings is what Arthur prefers to do. ‘By looking around and observing often, I might see things that others don't see,’ he says. For him, a detail is a secret world, a world within a world. Full of nuances and surprises. It fascinates him when people look at his work from a distance and then, up close, discover new elements that give them a different experience of the artwork. These hidden layers make his work extra fascinating and enhance the interaction with the viewer.
‘I am obsessed with details. Someone told me it sometimes reminds me of the miniatures in Byzantine art. You can only work in such detail if you enjoy doing it. I am not concerned with the end result.’ Starting from an idea, whether concrete or not, is what Arthur does. And then he starts. Intuitively, gradually. Drawing and inventing run simultaneously. If he knows beforehand where he is going, he loses interest and the desire to continue working. ‘I build up my drawings with all small elements and use colours on top of each other. When a drawing is finished, it is coloured three times by way of example.’
‘The advantage of coloured pencils is that they give you a lot of control. You can also work in great detail, which is necessary because I tend to fill my drawings completely.’ And you can take that literally. Arthur's drawings overflow with colours, characters, scenes, objects and details. When you connect all these elements together, stories emerge. Or rather a multitude of possible stories. If you look closer, you discover what micro-particles all these elements are made of. Once there, you dive into the inner world of the artist and are invited to slow down your thoughts and rest in the moment. In the detail.
With our art project, we want to give opportunities to young artists. Opportunities that make a difference in the development of their trajectory. In Arthur's case, this mainly means pushing boundaries. For example, to scale up from relatively small pencil drawings to an 8m by 4m wall. ‘I was always curious to see how my drawings would take shape when working larger. I also think that using paint could be refreshing for me, away from colour pencils for a while. I will have to solve things in a different way than I do on a sheet of paper anyway.’
