Great Fish

The lyrics read: Loving the great fish is the ultimate and end too Well that is true enough. Tony was an avid fisherman. He liked rivers, lakes even stocked ponds. I guess it quietened his mind concentrating on the next catch. He usually caught us a meal, but once in a while I would outfish him. This is a monoprint from 1975.

Poison

In 1998 there was a major flood in Antwerp and surroundings and our address having been Lageweg 431 in Hoboken we were thoroughly flooded out. Tony saved the two dogs floating on a chair after coming home from the hospital and the factory must have opened some lines which they shouldn't have. The result was a poisonous slme, sludge clearly visible after pouring out od the factory. This paper was tainted by it and Tony painted the appropriate subject on it: Poison. He cared about nature, was a fisherman and wanted the water to be clean. He wasn't the best recycler though. He also loved his cars, the excuse being his getting out of breath when walking too far. This piece was in the retrospective of Hoboken 'A brush'.

Joe's harlequin

I remember a time Tony came home from Europe, Antwerp, Belgium, Paris, the Stent, and maybe that little town that invited Clinton to play his saxophone. He was hungry and tired and really wanted to get back to LA. But first he wanted to spend a few days with us in Las Vegas. In a couple of days he put together a group of drawings and paintings. Then all too soon he was off, he left Las Vegas on a Greyhound bus and headed west. A few days later he returned with a big grin on his face and was driving his brand new red 4wd Samurai. Can you imagine that, spending a couple of hours on the floor doing what you love best (painting) and then trading it for a $10,000.00 vehicle? This was not the first time that I had seen Tony do something like that. I recall another time when I drove him to the Veteran’s Hosp in California so he could have surgery on his eyes. Tony returned the favor by inviting me to visit him and Annmarie in their house in Antwerp. I was broke and couldn’t afford to go so he and Annmarie paid my way. Thanks Annmarie. Another thing that Tony did for me was that he gave me a few paintings. I had found a couple of stretched pieces of canvas and gave them to him thinking he would paint something beautiful and sell it. But instead what he did was to give them back to me, finished pieces of fine art. Here is one is one of those for you to see.
Joe B.



I was always proud to have him as my uncle and happy we became good friends too.

Addendum: Tony liked his nephew too. He admired him as a fisherman. We fished Willow Beach together and Eagle Lake... but they quarreled about who was the best guitar player in the world. And the little town where Adolphe Sax came from is Dinant in the Ardennes...

Fishing

Chloride and the gasstation. Tony would love it and it made him despair. He felt good and at home and totally lonesome. He had friends, some loved his work, some loved his music, but he didn’t feel his work was understood. If it would get too much we would go fishing: in Willow Beach, Lake Mead, the South Cove, Echo Canyon (fly fishing) and Eagle Lake in Nevada where he caught some impressive brownies, Katherine’s Landing, along the Colorado in Laughlin behind the casino’s and at the end of Diamond Creek Road on the Hualapai Reservation, 22 miles of rough washboard road but with an immense beauty would surrounding him. He never caught anything there, not even had a nibble, but he would bullshit with a few of the guys there. Bij the way, Tony's picture is taken right there after fishing at the end of Diamond Creek Road. He would do sketches. One of them is in the Kingman Museum of History and Art. All that is in the painting Indian Sun shown and sold in December 1998 In Lineart Ghent, Belgium.

Diamond Creek Road♣

The intimate majesty of playing shade
on a curved wall
encompasses all

The wisdom of waiting for water
the strength of storms and stones
the beauty of belonging
and then
there is the shadow of the gods
and the fading of the light
when the windfull wings fold
and fall