WILL

WILL Le Jardin des couleurs, Aire Libre/Champaka 2012 Original cover, also published in Mirages by Daniel Maghen in 2017. Signed. Acrylic on paper 50 × 39.7 cm (19.69 × 15.63 in.) Will, aka Willy Maltaite, is first and foremost a painter. He discovered comics thanks to his mentor, Joseph Gillain alias Jijé, the leader of the "Marcinelle School", the core of the Journal de Spirou in the 1950s. Jijé was above all an artist himself. He taught the young Maltaite the rudiments of painting and sculpture. Jijé was influenced by Fauvism, in particular Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, as well as by École de Paris painters such as Raoul Dufy and Modigliani. Willy Maltaite's touch is more modern, as can be seen in this high composition (he signs his name here, not his comic-book pseudonym: Will), and he is part of this line of painters where light triumphs, but who are not unaware of the abstract experiments of a Sonia Delaunay. In terms of line, his stylized volutes signal the influence of English illustrator Ralph Steadman, whom he admired. All these qualities make Will one of the most "artistic" signatures of the Belgian School of Comics. "For me, The Garden of Colors is one of my father's most beautiful paintings. It has a very special flavor, because the garden is my parents' and the lady is inevitably my mother." Éric Maltaite