Over twenty-five years ago, when I first came to live in Belgium, I met Chantal at Dutch classes at my local commune. I was busy with my two, then three, young children, and Chantal followed art classes locally. We met occasionally, but when, a couple of years later, it was time for my family to pack up and move on, we lost touch.

Then recently, Chantal found me on Facebook.

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She sent me photos of my children she'd taken back in 1987, just before we left Belgium. She clearly already had a talent for lighting and composition back then.

Today I drove off into Flanders to meet her again. It was as though no time at all had passed, although we’d both moved on a long way from those early language classes.

Chantal is now an accomplished artist. In her workshop, she showed me neat little boxes filled with stones, twigs, glistening sand, and all sorts of bits and pieces that she finds as she walks around the countryside.

I asked her to tell me her story:

‘When I was thirty-six, I went to the Académie des Beaux Arts as a mature student. I spent five years studying there. My earlier art classes had been rather basic: I learnt to make very realistic reproductions, and worked only with a pencil and paper. But that initial experience stood me in good stead: it’s a bit like a musician who has to play scales, boring but useful – in fact, essential – part of the path an artist has to follow.

I suppose I became interested in art as a young child. When I was little I always messed about in my grandmother’s garden. She had upturned bottles marking her flowerbeds, and I used to mix soil and water with a stick in the hollows on the bottoms, and draw pictures with my paste. I even experimented with making natural pigments. My nickname was Chantal Berdouille (Messy Chantal).

When I came out of the Académie, I wanted to start with a clean slate. I had learnt a huge amount, but I felt like doing my own thing. I became interested in early cave paintings, and this has strongly influenced my work. I felt I needed to get right back to the basics: I worked with brushes made with fur, or with sticks, and engraved on my canvases which I had thickened with sand or earth. I used rocks, slates, anything I found in nature.

I never had the opportunity to travel as far as I would have liked, so my journeys were in books. I have always been nourished by my studies in libraries. My paintings recall places I haven’t visited, but I did visit rock paintings in the Dordogne, though.

I became interested in signs, and started trying to find signs in rock paintings from all over the world. I was fascinated by the aesthetic aspect of different types of writing, rather than by the meaning of the words.

I believe that you can find similarities in rock paintings everywhere. Even today, many artists work in the same direction, just like world mythologies. You find the same themes all over. People may set off from very different starting points, but in the end, representations end up with a unity – like a wavy line for the sea, for example.

I used to do a lot of sculpture, and now many of my sculptures are included in my paintings.

My work is always on textured canvas, which is imbibed and stiffened with various materials from nature. I often superimpose hieroglyphics and wordwide alphabets on my paintings. I even have invented a calligraphy of my own – it resembles, perhaps, Arabic writing, but it has no meaning apart from what it visually says to the viewer. I think we all have engraved in us world roots – universal, earth roots.

I have had several exhibitions, but it’s practically impossible for an artist to be able to live off these. You need to find other ways. And exhibitions are a great way of making contacts. Ten years ago a Dutch company got in touch with me after an exhibition, and that’s when I started renting out my works. I have a collection rented out in Holland, and several in Belgium. Sometimes a client may fall in love with a painting, and not want to part with it after the rental contract, so they buy it.’

Chantal and I have a great day together, cycling around the lakes at Hofstade near her home,

and catching up on virtually two half-lifetimes.

When I am ready to leave, Chantal offers me one of her works as a gift. It's called 'Le Labyrinthe de l'Inconscient' - 'The Labyrinth of the Unconscious.' Like all her paintings, it is in natural, earthy colours. On a rough, speckled light brown background, she had pasted a print of a letter written by Sigmund Freud, the writing, in green ink, smudged and faded. Superimposed on that is her own invented calligraphy, flamboyantly loopy, but neat, in black ink. And on top of that is an image of a labyrinth, with gold and pencil grey lines on a black background. It makes me think of order in disorder: a bit like my desk, my mind, or my life.

Although I cannot draw to save my life, and have absolutely no talent in plastic arts, Chantal and I found we had a lot in common. I’m sure we won’t let another quarter century go by before we meet again.

To see Chantal’s work, click here: http://www.chantalborremans.com/