Atome D Painting

F.man (Brussels, Belgium) took her first artistic steps at 11 years old when she painted her first portraits in oil on canvas. Based on her early works, she was accepted to the Sint-Lukas Art Academy in Brussels when she was 15 without the customary entrance exams. During her seven-year training, she perfected techniques and skills without losing her artistic freedom and spontaneity. In 1995, she was winner of the art contest organised in honour of the Belgian CoBrA artist Christian Dotremont, with her work entitled "˜Manneke Pis'. The death of her parents one year later (in 1996) and the existential questions associated with this loss heralded a new artistic phase in which F.man discovered abstract worlds and dimensions. She experimented with gold, silver and metallic paint and captured our relationship with other worlds in images that change depending on the incidence of light and their location. The fact that everything is transitory and constantly in movement became the leitmotiv throughout her works. In search of inspiration and new insights, she travelled to Antwerp, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Bratislava, Prague, Strasburg, Kuala Lumpur and Perth. During her travels, she was inspired by the visions of Klimt, da Vinci, Magritte and Rosetti. The old masters also grabbed her attention: CoBrA, Rik Wouters, Khnopff, Cox, Boticelli, Poussin and Rubens. Intrigued by man and his forms of expression, she became acquainted with Siang Mien, the Chinese art of face reading, and the classical art of drawing from a model. She continued to train herself in painting portraits. "˜So many people, so many perspectives and opinions': F.man sees it as a challenge to capture this diversity on canvas, in two-dimensional works of art that change due to external factors. To create the desired effect, she works with innovative techniques and psychedelic visual effects. For example, F.man's atypical interpretation of Expo '58 and the Atomium, paintings that evolve with light and time due to the careful selection of materials and colours.