'Panoramic landscape', 1975
Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm
Signed: lower right 'gies cosyns 1975'
Gies Cosyns (1920-1997)
'A teacher who becomes a professional painter, an artist who plays the mayor and restless organizes'. Thus it is written down in the fascinating monograph 'Gies Cosyns,
a lyric poet of the landscape' from 1981. He is called 'the painter of the Flemish Ardennes' and this 'occurs in the footsteps of the great painters of landscape art,
such as the brothers Paul, Jan and Herman van Limburg (15th century), Pieter Brueghel the Elder (16th century), Pieter Paul Rubens (17th century), Meindert Hobbema (17th/18th century),
Albijn van de Abeele (19th century) and Valerius de Saedeleer (20th century)'.
Gies Cosyns is born in Kwaremont, where his father is a teacher. He becomes also a qualified teacher and a gym teacher. On his 24th he, however, establishes himself as a
professional painter in his hometown, where he settles himself in the home and studio 'Owls Nest' in 1950. Fourteen years later he becomes mayor of that town and that he
remains until 1970. Why this mayoralty? 'As all the unspoiled nature in the industrial society Kwaremont is also threatened by spatial (dis) order, wild construction and decay.'
His mission is to 'keep his beloved Flemish Ardennes intact for future generations.' That is why his canvases are pure love statements to 'the ancient land as it always was'.
He paints almost nothing else, except occasionally the immense sea.
In his landscapes you never see people. 'They are too small and would disappear in the indulgence of the vista' and 'they don't really belong there. The things that grow there
are real, like a tree that washes, crooked or straight, high or wide, scanty or as thickets'.
Gies Cosyns prefers to paint the spring, autumn or winter. 'Then the trees are leafless and do not form a screen that reduces visibility'. His subject never bores him.
'There are seasons and months, mornings and evenings, temporal coincidences as rain and fog, snow and mist, the long twilights of the fall and the transparency of early
springtime', so he explains. His deep love for this landscape, you also experience at this charming painting.
