Tony De Wolf was born in Antwerp, Belgium in September 1961. Since he was a little boy, he liked drawing. Whenever he could find a pencil and paper, he started to make sketches, trying to draw like the great Old Masters, as well as what he saw around him, objects, pictures just anything he could lay his eyes on. His stubbornness made him survive in various situations. There was this goal that kept him going: proving that he would become a great painter, wanting to show his talent to the world, becoming a colleague of so many artists he admired throughout his youth.
No one in his family predicted such a talent but nevertheless he kept faithful to his passion. The will to reach the nearly unattainable, to touch the unreachable, to create the almost perfect visual reality in his paintings, made him what he is today... an extremely talented and valuable artist.
After seven years of painting classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Tony looked for new horizons, new challenges and found private guidance in the atelier of Willem Dolphyn and later with Peter Van Tongerloo. Here he found new important technical and moral support, which led to controlling the art of still-life painting, in a hyper realistic way.
His compositions display the technical gifts of the Old Masters yet incorporate a fresh approach in presentation and selection of subjects. He has no wish to trick the viewer into believing they are viewing an Old Master; he is creating contemporary paintings in the twenty-first century. His compositions leave the spectator stunned... you can almost smell the fruit, while enjoying the freshness of their colours. The compositions are thoughtfully considered, the combination of beautifully laundered linen, lusciously ripe fruit and cool-colour combinations resonate well with the senses. The gentle humour he displays with the placing of certain objects is subtle, the distorted reflections encourage you to look deeper into the paintings, engaging your eye and intellect with equal intensity. Tony’s chosen objects are painted to perfection including their flaws, the blemishes on fruit, chips in china, scratches in silver, maybe a fray on the linen, all suggesting a past life and adding yet another layer of thought and enjoyment to the paintings.
There is no doubt that Tony is a genius with the paint. Layers of oil paint are thinly applied to build up a near flawless beautiful surface. He compliments all is work with simple black frames with a silver slip, he also offers a silver leaf frame option should you want to make it more contemporary. He tends to work on more than one painting at a time in his studio, sometimes up to three of four. His work is finished off with several layers of varnish to almost give it that appearance that its behind glass, a unique technique.
