Koenraad Tinel was born in 1934 in Ghent, Belgium, he is Flemish. His father is a Great War hero who became a sculptor, his mother plays the piano and sings, he has two older brothers and a little sister. A bourgeois family rather versed in the arts, therefore. Except that his father admires Adolf Hitler and his brothers are going to join the SS. The bucket is the story of the war experienced by the family and seen through the eyes of the child author. It is above all a drawn story. Koenraad Tinel is an artist, designer and sculptor. His drawings are impressive, often dark and dotted with spots. The texts are brief, like captions to the drawings. Translated from Flemish they tell the story factually, without pathos. This war experienced by the child has left traces in the adult he has become. It is these traces that Koenraad Tinel draws and captions, like an intimate geography map finally revealed. If the map is not the territory, this work of memory seems so necessary to the author that the reader is also a little splashed by it. Beyond everything we can say and feel about it, this book is an act of great generosity, that of art when it shows the intimate, lays it bare. Are we intimate enough with each other, are we intimate enough with ourselves?
