MY PRACTICE OF PAINTING IN A NUTSHELL
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A canvas support, but flax, solid with a medium grain but sometimes thick paper also for smaller sizes,
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a sketch, oil painting for the slowness and the gloss,
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pure Gem turpentine, that of the pine, rather than the "white spirit" which gives me a headache,
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synthetic or pork silk brushes, and inspiration at less than 100 meters from the shore of the ocean or lake.
For simple and nostalgic scenes with obvious subjects: childhood, recklessness, family too, and sunny happiness. The opportunity today to enjoy the openness of these beaches, the distance from others, freedom. Because here when you turn your back to others you face the ocean. A luxury.
Ah! I forgot a topic of major inspiration : surfing of course I start in 1982, a time of free childhood, my best childhood, when my parents, too busy elsewhere, have not witnessed. Two good summer months were offered to us. We were going to surf every day, satisfied with not much, hungry for macaroni in between two sessions, ready to line up in front of the waffle iron on a gaz stove. The time of the waffles made on demand.
Just happy.
It's me or everything was more yellow, more amber, more "fat to milk" and tiare? Monokinis, and even zerokinis happily rubbed shoulders with textiles on the beach facing the last building of the Océanides. The quest for this happiness began from the end of carefree summers and it continues again.
Yet we never really found again these waves, the sand banks and the "baïnes", the glowing clouds of the sunset on the film, this heatwave when the ladybugs covered the wooden fences on this summer of 1976. In my selective memory, the Northwest wind did not exist.
We keep looking. I keep looking. Of course, we have lived for beautiful summer days, beautiful waves, beautiful memories too, enough to wake the child buried, before the adult and especially his aches do not quickly take over.
In recent years, painting has gained ground while waiting for the waves.
To look at between two summers, to ward off the winter when he is gaining too much ground and we are taken seriously doubting the return of summer.
