Gabrielle Climbling down To El Chañar Ravine Painting

I'm a French painter and engraver, born 1954, living en Chile for 12 years. The required level of skill to make good etchings allowed me to become a more demanding paintor. I like the technical challenges of painting and engraving. I have been teaching painting in Chile for 10 years. Figuration for etching, hyperrealism and expressionist abstraction for painting are what I prefer to do. Engraving: My work is done in at least two stages: a plate for the image support, and another for tattoos. This superposition allows me to create encounters between cultures that have never met (example: the mask of Tutankamon with Ashentis tattoos). My goal tends to renew the view that the viewer has on the various elements. Abstract painting: The Chilean culture made me know runes, which have lost their original meanings and acquired here a magical dimension. I abstractly report the magical meaning of these runes. Hyperrealism: In my landscape paintings (I fell in love with pampas and Chilean deserts) I try to erase the effects specific to photography rather than trying to approach a photographic rendering. I do not want people saying "it looks like a picture" but "it looks like reality". But as nature does not care much about pictorial rendering, the reality is rarely as it appears on the painting. Especially since I usually add a detail denoting the human presence.