Lilou (Sold) Painting

Born in 1960 near Paris, France, François Plumart studied fine arts at the Orleans School of visual Arts [Academy of Art and Design, Orleans.] After years of research on the media and techniques of the old Flemish masters Van Eyck, Rubens and Van Dyck, he acquired a passion for portraiture, which was considered for centuries as a major form on the path to mastery of painting, but which, after 1945, lost ground to photography, an art considered more modern. Beyond an opportunity to delve deeper in his original explorations on the color effects of black and white painting, and the study of opalescence which Goethe himself never could theorize, portraiture represents for François the sharing of strong emotions; for this art form is a social connection, each portrait having an individual history, sometimes happy, occasionally sad, linked to family. François reduces the palette to a minimum, with no mixing. He uses exclusively titanium white and various blacks selected for their specific qualities, in layered glazes. Using wood panels he prepares according to methods used since the Middle-Ages, he works directly, with no preliminary sketch, using warm and cold tints and other color effects generated exclusively from black and white, without the usual adjunction of other colors. The originality of François’ work is recognized by ADAGP (Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Plastiques et Graphiques).