After attending Luc Perot’s workshops in Namur, I moved to Japan in 1973. After studying Japanese in Tokyo, I first worked in decoration and opened my first workshop in Nishiwaki. Became a member of the Kokuten in 1981, I worked with the painter Ryû Oda of Himeji and I started calligraphy with the zen monk Tainin Yukimura in Shobara. In 1984, I was the winner of the Kansai Kokuten competition in Kyoto, and I exhibited in Himeji, Tokyo, Kyoto and Kobe, before continuing my synthesis work in search of an expression that would merge the arts of East and West. If this amber painting, with its strong, vibrant, reverberating colours, bore the traces of a calligraphy used by Buddhist monks, I continued under the constraint of things by transforming naturalism by the complex relationship of colors and the insistence of increasingly fine glazes until the hyperrealisation of reality. Scholarly as well as natural, my technique is that of my vision. Seeking the diaphanous, I use a minimum of matter and seek transparency to cross the heaviness of reality in an beyond figuration.

Back in Belgium with my Japanese wife in 1990, I set up my studio in Spa and exhibited regularly in Brussels, at the Montjoie gallery and then at “123… Art Now”. Shortly before the year 2000, I embarked on abstract compositions with black ink on white backgrounds, Gutta, stains and various traces directly corporeal, which I rework daily in a continuous back and forth between the eyes and the hand. Since 2010, I have also been producing women’s faces and tall nudes on black backgrounds. In 2017, I published with Jean-Marie Cambier 400 pages of reflections on art in a book entitled “A vin nouveau outres neuves !” and began publishing the workshop journals that I have been writing ever since I arrived in Japan in 1973. Vedia dedicated an album to me on October 16, 2017.

I also participated as a guest at the philo lunch at the University of Namur on October 10, 2018 (see the pdf document below).

de Saint-Yon’s creative process (in Saachi Art)

Born in 1948 in Belgium, Daniel de Saint-Yon is a Belgian writer and portraitist living and working in the countryside near Spa. He graduated as an philosopher from FUNDP in Namur and lived as an artist 16 years in Japan (until 1990). His work has been regularly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Belgium and Japan. Staying receptive to the history and the cultural interaction between Europe and Japan is one of his main concern. de Saint-Yon’s creative process starts with sketches and drawing from life on the canvas. He paints mostly portraits (mainly women), spending a great deal of time with each subject, a rapport with his model being necessary to work. He tried several mediums but somehow always returns to amber as he finds it the ideal and enigmatic partner adapted to his needs of expression. This light oily substance of rare purity and beautiful transparency takes some days to dry out, but brightens tonnes and offers remarkable elasticity. Several thin layers of extra-fine paint will sustain for ever the ardour and bloom of colour fields with strong visual impact. A patient process for a unique result !

2018 October 10th