Picnic in the jungle (after Manet) Painting

MICHEL TESTARD A wandering painter of cultures I paint from the perspective of a traveller — not a tourist tagging destinations - an observer seeking authentic encounters with people, everyday life, places present and past. My work is rooted in the crossings between cultures: the colors of India’s rituals and ruins, the silent austerity of Antarctic landscapes, the melancholy grace of forgotten cities, and the comic poetry of everyday life. Travel, for me, is not evasion — it is attention. It demands humility, presence to the other, and the willingness to see beauty and tension in unfamiliar forms. Whether walking the ghats of Varanasi or wandering through the frozen silence of Patagonia, I try to absorb gestures, textures, and atmospheres. These impressions return in the studio not as literal scenes, but as reconstructed memories — filtered through imagination, emotion, and color. I work quickly, letting intuition guide the brush, my style is spontaneous and expressionist. My paintings try to show glimpses of lived experience — refracted, transposed, reinvented. My originality - if any - lies in blending East and West, reality and fantasy, past and present, reflecting a dedication to seeing the world through a wandering, reflective lens.