Willy Van de Velde has always been fascinated by drawing. As a boy he copied the cartoons of Walt Disney and painted small landscapes in gouache. He attended evening classes at the academy of Merksem with Frank-Ivo Van Damme and Antoon Vermeylen.( 2 graphic artists) They introduced him in the world of graphic techniques such as etching, dry point, linocut and wood-engraving. Due to lack of time (family-life, full-time teaching) and an enormous interest in all kinds of art, he refused to specialize and attended painting-classes at the academies of Merksem and Kontich with Ludo Lacroix, Alex De Mulder and Staf Van Elzen.

Painting landscapes and cities with watercolour became a real passion and he acquired a very direct, spontaneous, nervous, vivid and colourful style. So, in the 80ies and 90ies, he painted his hometown, Antwerp, during all seasons.

Travelling through Europe, he brought hundreds of watercolours with him from France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Rumania, etc. But also spatial work interested him: in the eighties he attended evening classes at the academy of Brasschaat. Ghislain Heirbaut taught him how to handle chisels to cut in stone or wood and Raf Thijs made him familiar with all tricks of moulding. Thanks to a part-time job from 1994 onwards, he could attend a course of lithography at the RHOK in Brussels with the worldfamous lithographer from Prague, Rudolf Broulim. He experimented with both realistic and abstract work, in black or colour, with lithographic crayons or ink.

After obtaining all these techniques during the years, he managed to work freely and spontaneously. There is much diversity in his themes according to inspiration, circumstances and surroundings. So, in the ninetees, he painted a big series of gouaches on paper inspired by the poetical still lives of Willi Van Couwenberghe, teacher in Brasschaat. While staying in Spain for 3 months,he modeled a number of "buildings",based on the typical old, white houses. They became archetypes for the Spanish way of life.

By coincidence, he became aware of the dynamic beauty of boats in all human cultures and constructed a series of boatsculptures with all kinds of material: wood, plaster, iron, stone, terracotta, porcelain, etc.

From sculpturing to ceramics was only a small step. He wasn't interested in throwing pots or doing a handicraft (ceramics is often considered as an applied art) but he wanted to produce a series of monumental objects, often decorated with engobes or glazes.

In his portraits (gouache on paper) he tries to paint the looks of the people in such a way that the person becomes a "type", a universal character, without any special effects.

The last 5 years, he became aware of the increasing abundance of, on one hand, the overwhelming influence of communicationmedia, and, on the other hand, a lack of real human, intimate contacts within families and relationships. This fact became a subject for lots of charcoal-drawings, oil-paintings, watercolours and sculptures. The tension he creates between the characters sometimes reminds us of film-stills.