Ronny Moortgat Belgian, Contemporary

Ronny Moortgat is one of the foremost contemporary artists of marine painting. Following in the footsteps of the great maritime masters of the twentieth-century, he depicts his subjects with great discipline, capturing every minute detail of the vessels. Ronny Moortgat was born in Niel in Belgium in 1951, with the legacy of his childhood spent growing up on the banks of the River Schelde. His fascination with the sea was engendered from a young age, sailing the tidal estuaries of the Netherlands and The Channel as a child. Moortgat’s family would also leave an enduring legacy on the artist, as he has observed: “The reason to paint maritime subjects is probably to be found with my family roots. On my mother’s side there were quite a few river barge men and my father was involved in the shipping business".

As with so many of our marine painters, an obsession with the sea was not only inculcated in childhood, it was almost a birth right. Although Moortgat’s parents would insist on his achieving a school diploma before beginning his career as a painter this clearly did little to dampen his artistic enthusiasm. Spending six years at art school where he engaged in the centuries-old Low Countries tradition of etching and printing alongside drawing and painting; his multifaceted talent is still evident today in his range of media from watercolours to bronzes.

Trained as a technical draftsman, Ronny has since combined his own more impressionistic approach with the strictly classical. The ability to integrate the virtuosic detail of technical drawing alongside personal style is a hallmark of the best Marine Painters, conjoining the detail necessary to capture elaborate rigging and period details and at the same time generating the evocative approach to texture and lighting needed to bring such intricacy to full life through expressive brushwork.