Bertrand Martin

I grew up in Burgundy and now live in South of France. I am a figurative oil painter.

I use oil to paint faces and figures that emerge from a fractured, fragmented abstraction set up as a symbolic relationship between volume and space, between softness and sharpness. Everything is about mixing opposites and extremes, innocence and harshness, confronting the different realities of the world. No matter how chaotic everything seems, beauty is still there.

I started learning the fundamentals of drawing and watercolor as a child from my watercolorist grandfather and then started a career in engineering. But as my 40th birthday approached, I could not longer ignore the pull of my artistic calling and threw myself headlong into watercolor and later oil painting. My first professor in oil painting was Jean-Louis Morelle, one of the father of the modern watercolor. I then learnt painting in the Paris Academy of Art and with several painters such as Zhaoming Wu and Shane Wolf.