Animals
Animals are a common theme in Lucas’ oeuvre. Yet it can hardly be called animalier. His activities require a broader field of work and his personality has the urge and ability to translate himself in multiple ways.
“I understand the animals I depict in their symbolic value and their anatomical essence, whereby I make figurative accessibility necessary for the viewer. I consider them a synthesis of art of ideas and an expression of great concern. In the loyalty of the albatross, the friendship of the duck, the eternal youth of the crane, my soul travels with every animal through the being of man.”
Musk ox
“As mentioned elsewhere, I have an archetypal affection for herd animals and grass eaters. I have lived most of my life on Arctic ice and virtually share the protective fur of bison and musk oxen with them. And it is precisely the texture of that monumental animal that is so fascinating for my modeling technique with jute. It is that burlap that makes expression possible in one movement. As I already wrote about iron: once again a material with an irreplaceable soul.”
Bison
“Since my childhood I have been fascinated by everything that had to do with ‘the Indians’; all of Karl May’s books are still somewhere in the archives of my brain. But especially the continental slaughter of people and animals by a much larger and stronger predator has placed my eternal solidarity with them on a granite pedestal.
On Easter 1991, the mess of many years was finally cooked and my plaster statue spewed out in a fortnight. The following year it was cast in bronze and placed in the Zoo after expertise. For ‘Antwerp 93’, the Zoo chose my bison as a poster in the publications. The bison, and other cattle with it, belong to the core of my archetypal being, I notice this again and again from the evident ease with which I sculpt them, small, large, in plaster, in steel, in wax or in clay.”
Camel
“One of the images that have given me the most pleasure over the course of its existence is my camel. I had deliberately made it slightly smaller than full size so as not to scare its riders because everything around and between the bumps was made for climbing and they made a lot of use of it with snaps and such. You are often not allowed to get images at exhibitions, I think that’s a shame if they are images that can withstand it.”
Horse & polo
As a five-year-old, Lucas was ‘outsourced’ to a Walloon family during the holidays to learn French from a cattle dealer. He remembers the markets, the mini black smock, the sales and the splendor of the imposing bulls and horses. Around the age of ten he took riding lessons and at the age of fifteen he worked in a riding school for a whole month. The knowledge of and the bond with the animal were strengthened during the holidays with veterinarian ‘Meester Derde’ with consultations with riding, jumping, racing and draft horses. Horses and cattle continued to frolic and trot around the common thread of his life and it was only during the making of The Kite that the dormant muse in the Dying Cow awakened. Coertjens bought this during the exhibition in the Boerentoren and immediately ordered a farm horse, champion stallion of the Brabant Draft Horse.
A few years later I came into contact with the polo world and stayed in it for a few years.
“Girl on Tranquera” was born from an invitation to a polo match where I met the horse Tranquera, and a feminist impulse from my own archetypal personality structure: a mild critique of male domination in that sport. Then followed another quarter, an Arabian, some show jumping horses, smaller bronzes and orders from private owners.
Elephant
In ’91, Lucas was given permission by the director of the Zoo to sculpt Nouchka’s head in the wings. During a break in the Egyptian temple, he stood for half an hour watching the elephants eat. There, for the first time, he felt a sense of tenderness and sympathy. Elephants, for example, have wonderful senses: they recognize skeletons they encounter on their wanderings, they have a telepathic ability that registers the death of beloved creatures, they watch over their dead, they hear, feel, smell everything up to twelve kilometers away.
At the same time, Lucas also has a sense of shame at being part of a species that, without any responsibility, lets go of all its urges to always have more and be more powerful, as individuals and as a group, at the expense of the weakest.
“I also have that tenderness and shame while I sculpt them, so unique and ingenious: their strange soft skin that I was once able to feel, skeleton and shape completely different from other animals, their tusks, their appearance, which I try to capture and represent.”
Impala
Bull
Lion
