Siberian Iris, more precisely Iris sanguinea are one of the first flowers coming up in springtime in our garden. Actually, they are growing wild everywhere in the Garrigue and when we started re-building our garden, we found lots of them around.
That elegant, fine flower inspired me to my new painting "Lillies".
abstract painting
Between all the house restoration work, I had time to do another painting. When doing a full house restoration we really start from the bottom, removing everything what was added to the original structure of house, leaving us with bare walls, without floors and ceilings, left with the rough, basic foundation.
When we are done with our restoration work, a shiny and beautiful surface is visible and make people feel welcomed.
Space to store my paintings wasn’t a real problem as I nearly sold everything after a short while, but not all, of course 😉
Those paintings which are still with me I put back in big cartons and shuffled them around in our cave. But then, we had a water problem and it was just in the last-minute I rescued my paintings for being destroyed.
After a long pause, caused by a water damage in my little atelier and due to lots of renovation work, I started painting again.
This time, I layered oil paints over ash and washed them away again and again to create subtle effects. It’s a play of appearing and disappearing, of strong presence and nebulous absence. Like memories, they come and go, sometimes they are very clear and sometimes you wondering if an event really happened or if it is just in your imagination.
After a long break, I painted a little bit again yesterday.
Well, it was more of a few exercises to try out some new materials and a different format. Everything should be very small, at max. 5 x 7 cm. And that was and still is the biggest challenge for me, because painting in such small formats I found extraordinarily difficult. So I experimented a bit with ink, silk, pastels and marble flour on paper.
Somehow that was quite exhausting for me, I felt very limited in my workflow by the smallness of the paintings.
J’ai été invité à montrer certaines de mes peintures à l’exposition annuelle de l’association d’art L’Atelier à La Palme.
L’association a été créé en 2012 par des personnes intéressées par l’art. Ils offrent des ateliers mensuels où vous pouvez apprendre les différentes techniques artistiques, allant de la peinture Aquarelle à la céramique Raku. Ces ateliers sont donnés par des artistes bénévoles ou professionnels, pour initier ou perfectionner dans la bonne humeur et la décontraction, à diverses techniques artistiques.
For a new painting I left a bit my usual way of mixing natural pigments with different media to create in-depth nuances of one or two colours.
Making that painting was a real struggle for me, on the one hand technically and on the other hand emotionally.
I used different blue pigments in different solvents which still reacted with each other long time after I decided the painting is ready, but not in the desired way. The components changed colours and structures and I needed to find out what happened to be able to correct it e.g. use it. Thus I tried different compositions on smaller canvas which resulted in a little series of blue-greens.
There are places in this world, I have to go there again and again and so I went last Friday. Roussillon, more precisely, the Conservatoire des ocres et de la couleur is such a place. Here I learned all the old techniques of wall plastering, here I always buy pigments and tools for my paintings and wall design, here I get advice and answers to technical questions.
This is such a beautiful place, it is so pleasant to stroll through the rooms of the old ochre mill and get inspired by all these wonderful colours.
In the 18th century, quinine, obtained from South America was the expensive medicine used to treat Malaria. Because of the high costs, chemists were experimenting to develop a synthetic equivalent, so did W.H.Perkin. He did not succeed in creating quinine out of coal tar but accidentally discovered the colour mauve.