"Cavalcade" Painting

I have been attracted to painting as an art form since the age of seven. Strangely, it is the french - and later english - romantic poetry, which drove me to drawing and painting and to my passion for colours : Charles Baudelaire, Théodore de Banville, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, John Keats, William Blake and other poets fro the second part of the 19th century... Indeed, the symbolic association of words and colours in their clever use of metaphors, circumlocutions and other surrealistic images, fascinated me. Especially everyday expressions and idioms such as : to do something "once in a blue moon", to come "out of the blue", to show "one's true colours", "to feel blue", to be "in the pink", to be "black and blue", to have a "blackhead", to tell "white lies", to have a "yellow streak", to be "green with envy", to "paint the town red", to use one's "gray matter", to be "yellow-bellied", to be "caught red-handed", and so on... At first, inspiration drawn from such expressions drove me to write poetry. Then it went on to feed my imagination, and convinced me that painting, which allows the use of the widest possible choice of colours and shades, is not only an art form, but beyond this a language in itself ! Granted, a language without a voice, but unencumbered by the limitations of that voice - an art form which gave me complete freedom of expression. I started painting, teaching myself, when I was 17. In those days, I was essentially copying materials found in books and magazines, trying to understand the basics of this form of expression and of its infinite potential. I started expressing myself in earnest through painting at the age of 27.