Eliora Bousquet

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 ! Grante...