This post is for and about the man who inspires, raises, protects, loves, looks after and cares for me, my father: Luk Van Soom.
Back in the days, when carrying me on his shoulders didn’t cause a hernia, I found it hard to understand what my dad actually did for a living. The only things I saw were the fact that he roped in 50% of the house with his atelier, he never had to leave for work at the same hour and he played a lot with clay and plaster. As long as I can remember, there were always ‘weird’ people around the house who loved to tinker and they all stayed over for dinner. This involved my mother having nervous breakdowns because next to a fulltime job and raising two daughters, it seemed like she was also running a restaurant.
A few years later I was taught the meaning of the word ‘sculptor’ and my mom discovered the proverb “behind every great man stands a great woman”. That was one hell of a relief.
My dad was born in Turnhout in 1956, it was kind of a special event at the time, since my grandmother had already reached the age of 42 while giving birth to her youngest son. He grew up with his brother and sister in a small village in the north of Antwerp and decided to become a sculptor before he had ever seen one piece of art in real life. Living the artistic dream in the middle of nowhere all the way back in the 70’s didn’t create an immediate job opportunity. The advice was to choose a proper education: joiner it was.
But when something runs in your blood, there’s no way to stop it. At the age of 18 he took his motorcycle, drove to the Royal Academy of Antwerp and went to study the only thing he really wanted: sculpture. He did it with the full support of my grandmother, because there was nobody who believed more in his skills than she did. And he succeeded, successfully.
At the beginning of his career he specialized in the renovation of Romanesque and Gothic sculptures next to his own work, to make ends meet. Luckily there was my mom to feed and look after him, otherwise I don’t know how he would have survived. In 1985, after a series of solo and group exhibitions, his first big assignment in Ostend (Belgium) was a fact. And there were more to follow, Pharos(Delft, The Netherlands), Walhalla (Antwerp, Belgium) and House of the many worlds (Sevilla, Spain) are a few of his realizations during the eighties and early nineties.
Describing in detail all the subsequent sculptures would take too long, blame it on the endlessness of a creative mind. Let’s focus on the ones I admire most. First of all there’s L’adieu which he made for my grandmother, a true presentation of honest love and a strong connection between a son and his mother. Walking into a cloud is also one of my favorites. It reminds me of the fact that I look a lot like my father, we both live with our head in a cloud from time to time. And last but not least I’d like to put Welkom op de wereld Ruth on my list for very personal reasons.
I’ve waited quite some time with this post because writing about your own dad is rather personal and not that easy. Gladly I finally succeeded and now I hope he’s going to enjoy reading it (let’s say compared to other ‘behind atelier doors’, this one is kind of a surprise). Before ending I would also like to mention my mother and sister because “behind every great man there are a couple great women”!
Sculptures featured in the slideshow: Man Van Atlantis (2003, Avenue Waterloo, Brussels) – Rintracciamento dei mondi perduti (2003, Lelystad, The Netherlands), House of the many worlds (1992, Sevilla, Spain) – Walhalla (1993, Italiëlei, Antwerp) – Walking into a cloud (2007, Middelheim, Antwerp), Welkom op de wereld Ruth (1987, MUKHA, Antwerp) – Het gouden tijdperk (1993, Antwerp), L’adieu (2000, personal collection)
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