Overview
As both drawing and painting are synonymous with pleasure and relaxation to me, as soon as I have a moment, and my painting gear at hand, I paint.
I am a self-made artist and the only advice I ever got was from my Art teacher in Perpignan High School, ages ago.
Since January 2006, I have been attending the adult public course given by Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille. This has allowed me to compare my work to that of the other students, acquire new techniques, and evolve.
As far as I remember, I have always been drawing and painting for pleasure, and thus I am a passionate, dedicated amateur.
« I paint for pleasure and for “those who like my work ».
I possess no such thing as a studio, I just work on the very place where I live, which is very luminous. I work either with pastel, watercolours or oil. I feel sort of uneasy with acrylic painting which I find a bit austere and lacking flexibility owing to drying times too fast to enable you to work the paste as you may do with oil painting. But since my attending Ateliers Publics de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, I have endeavoured to work with acrylic painting, which makes carrying my works from a place to another easier, and I think I now master the medium.
Anyway, whatever the means, what I like above all is precision and details. From the places I have been to, i.e. France, Venice, and first and foremost Greece, namely the Cycladic Islands, I have kept various impressions left by landscapes, or people met on thousands of photos. Digital media allow to quickly retrieve the model still pregnant with original emotions. This is why most of my work derives from a photograph. The scarce moments spared from a fulfilling, exacting job, did not enable me to work directly on the very premises which inspired me.
Before starting to lay the colours, I sketch the lines of the drawing with precision. I place the different values on the canvas in order to position the shades which are to outline the relief.