The Land of 1001 nights Painting

"Human beings are thrown unwillingly into strange destinies that are foreign to them. Art is the miracle by which our lost dreams are restored to us". A self-taught artist, I began painting in 2014, shortly after the birth of my son. What led me to painting? Essentially the need to escape a boring professional life, to reconnect with my childhood dreams at a time when I'd lost my way, and the desire to bring fantasy to everyone (young and old). I was fascinated by the magnificent illustrations I discovered in the children's books I read to my son, and I wanted to create my own images, my own paintings, that would tell the story of my inner world, my dreams, my fantasies, my ideals. I wanted to paint what transported me, so as never to forget it, to keep a memory of it that I could pass on, communicate. I wanted to paint to reconcile myself with a life in which I didn't really recognize myself, to rediscover who I was, at last. To accept the past, understand the present and love it. Because beauty is everywhere after all, and you can always rewrite your life story. When I create characters in pencil, I never know in advance what I'm going to draw. I let my hand go, and then I see what appears. I like not knowing where my gesture will lead. I like to be surprised by what emerges from the first strokes of my pencil. I have the pleasant impression of accessing something of myself that had been lost (in my unconscious or in my distant memories, who knows?). Once I've collected a large enough number of pencil drawings, I look for the ones that could be assembled in a single scene, the characters who could have adventures together within a single painting. I spend a lot of time creating these compositions. Once I've discovered which characters have something to say to each other, and in which setting they might evolve, I move on to painting. I always paint my background first (a natural landscape) and then insert my characters. Everything is done in acrylic gouache. Painting and drawing seemed to me to be more reliable, more powerful means of expression than texts and speeches. Trained as a linguist, I spent a long time working on words and the construction of meaning, when I was preparing my doctoral thesis. The polysemy of languages can be so dizzying! Although I've always been sensitive to the poetry of literary works and the beauty of well-crafted arguments, I'm less moved by them today than by the poetry or beauty of images.