Summertime in Fitou is always exiting, not only because of the fantastic weather and the Mediterranean but also of all the people and friends coming over. It’s an international bunch of people, very diverse and interesting.
So many backgrounds and experiences resulting quite often in inspiring discussions about life, politics, economics, art, sports, eating, etc.
The command center, where everything else is getting energy and power from.
The kernel of a cell which contains most of the cell’s genetic material.
The central and brightest part of a comet.
The pieces that formed the center of a collection.
The important buildings which are the center of a city.
The center of all: the Nucleus.
During my trip to Vietnam at the end of last year I visited the exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Ho Chi Minh City.
That was somehow a weird mixture of old, classical, revolutionary painting and so called real socialism art. In the courtyard of the museum, many smaller galleries show traditional as well as modern paintings and sculptures.
When creating the sunny house I became curious about using cement in my paintings. I quite liked the combination of glossy oil paint and raw cement and got in my mind to create a little series using such materials. Yellow will be followed by blue and red, always adding cement to it.
So, that’s the second painting: Rough.
The challenge lies in the application of such a rough material to canvas and thus I needed to explore how to mix different sorts of cement so it does not crack when dry.
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".