ARTIST Frank Le Compte has died at the age of 92, six months after staging his final solo exhibition of landscape paintings in Wodonga.
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Mr Le Compte, of Chiltern, a widower, died in hospital at Wangaratta on Thursday after devoting his life to art.
Born in Belgium in 1917, he resisted his father’s pressure to become a baker like him.
Instead, he studied for five years at the Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp, tutored by Baron Isadore Opsomer, the court portrait painter for the Belgian royal family.
“I feel happy when I paint — to be an artist is a God-given gift,” Mr Le Compte said this year.
“I draw or paint nearly every day — it’s like being an athlete, to be good you have to train every day.”
By 1950, he was a skilled portrait and still-life artist and helped restore some of the art treasures of the Bishop’s Palace in Mechelen, Belgium, while working as a signwriter to supplement his income.
In 1963 Mr Le Compte, his wife, Maria, and their two daughters, Irma and Augusta, migrated to Australia.
At the Bonegilla migrant centre, someone recognised his signwriting skills and he got a job at the army bases, allowing the family to remain in Wodonga.
Mr and Mrs Le Compte opened a gallery at Yackandandah called Antverpia but spent several years in Perth before returning to the Border.
Solo exhibitions were held in Albury, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and Mr Le Compte occasionally returned home to hold exhibitions in Antwerp.
He found Europeans used to dreary weather loved Australian paintings with the bright colours of the bush.
His final exhibition showed 58 watercolour and oil paintings of scenes at Tallangatta, Bright, Chiltern, Eldorado, Yackandandah, Halls Gap, Lake Anderson, Allans Flat, Osbornes Flat and Dora Dora.
Mr Le Compte said then that he wanted to hold one last exhibition to thank the region that had welcomed him and his family.
He leaves two daughters and a number of grandchildren.
A funeral service will be held at Glenmorus Gardens on Tuesday at 11am.