Ronny Moortgat Belgian, Contemporary

Ronny Moortgat is a Belgian marine painter whose paintings of sailing ships and working vessels follow in the footsteps of the great maritime painters of the twentieth century, and who records hulls, sails and rigging with a precision that comes from his first training as a technical draughtsman. He was born in 1951 in Niel, in the province of Antwerp, and grew up beside the River Schelde, the tidal waterway that has carried shipping to and from the port of Antwerp for centuries, so that barges, coasters and ocean-going vessels were a daily sight from his earliest years. The sea itself soon followed. As a child he sailed the tidal estuaries of the Netherlands and crossed the English Channel, learning at first hand how wind, tide and weather act on a vessel, knowledge that later informed the set of a sail or the angle of a hull in his paintings. For Moortgat, the pull of maritime subjects runs deeper than childhood experience, as he has explained: "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 the marine painters represented by Gladwell & Patterson, a life connected to the water was less a choice than an inheritance. Moortgat spent six years at art school, where alongside drawing and painting he studied etching and printmaking, disciplines with a long history in the Low Countries, and the same breadth continues in his practice today, which extends from watercolour and oil to bronze sculpture. His training as a technical draughtsman gave him an exact understanding of construction and proportion, and over the course of his career he has combined that classical discipline with a freer, more impressionistic handling of paint. The drawing establishes the structure of each vessel, from the lines of the hull to the complex arrangement of masts, spars and standing and running rigging, while the brushwork describes the movement of water, the texture of weathered timber and canvas, and the changing light of the sky over the sea. This pairing of accurate detail with painterly handling places Moortgat within a tradition of marine painting in the Low Countries that stretches back to the seventeenth century, when Dutch painters such as Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger established the ship portrait as a subject in its own right, and which Moortgat continues today in paintings in which historic vessels are shown at sea, in harbour and under sail with both technical fidelity and an attention to atmosphere and light.