Although Spilliaert is often thought of as a painter, essentially, he was a draughtsman. A painter typically works with brushes and paint on canvas, panel or plaster, but Spilliaert employed other techniques. He used Indian ink, pastels, watercolour, gouache and pencil, and worked almost exclusively on paper or cardboard. Oil paint rarely makes an appearance in his oeuvre, making it difficult, strictly speaking, to classify him as a painter.
It is precisely the materials and techniques Spilliaert used that makes him such a unique artist. They allowed him to work quickly and flexibly, providing scope for experimentation. Moreover, he didn’t need a large studio; he often worked on a small scale, and for most of his life a sturdy board in his living space sufficed.1 This allowed him to create a vast number of works on paper, whereas he only produced about sixty oil paintings, which have a long drying time.2 For the sake of comparison, his vast oeuvre includes approximately 4,500 works, while his fellow townsman James Ensor, who lived twenty years longer, painted about 850 works, in addition to his many drawings and etchings.
So Spilliaert is definitely a draughtsman, but if you do refer to him as a painter you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Indeed, in his time his works were called ‘tableaux’ and he occasionally used the title of ‘artiste peintre’ (painter) when referring to himself. And if that’s not enough: the epitaph on his tomb, in the cemetery in Stuiverstraat, reads: ‘painter Léon Spilliaert.’ ‘Draughtsman’ or 'paper-based artist' doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
