Trees on old cello box Print

French Artist living in Los Angeles. In an image it's the support ( what I paint on) that interests me, that directs my attention. It becomes what I paint with... I choose to paint on “manufactured wood,” and like a sculptor working in relation to his material, I work toward painting something that is more about the origin, or the nature of the material. Wood is surprisingly an infinitely open and intriguing medium. Whereas canvas is passive, wood is warm. Like the markings and stratification of the sculptor’s marble, the unique knots, veins, textures, and patterns of the wood’s grain become integral factors in the painting’s composition and imagery, as if the dead tree is suggesting the creation of a new tree ~ an echo of the original ~ and a comment on the very nature of the supporting medium. The knots of the plywood dictate the trunks and limbs and branches of the tree, but the composition is decidedly abstract, unlike traditional painting, where the brushstroke of the artist become more apparent the closer one gets to the canvas, the closer you get to the wood, the more you see the tree. The hand of the artist disappears. Using Water, coffee to stain the wood, black acrylic and some love. Performing the magic of the manufactured wood being revealed & recovered of their essence by the illusionistic action of painting them. It is a sign of recognition, designed to repair or cross a separation of distance. The symbol is an object of agreement that exists to be the accordance of the minds and the reunification of the separated forms. The art is beneficial because it is symbolic, consolidating and restorative, and bringing a sense of unity between what has been broken, between what is and what is no more. How it started? When I was painting on wood I quickly realized that it was not a neutral material like the usual canvas, but that it was very much alive with all its quality & essence even after being cut and manufactured for our ways of life. One day I found a piece of plywood laying down near a house construction, abandoned & covered with mud and certainly going to the dump. I brought it back to the studio and when I took a sponge to clean the mud, the trace I did was just like the trunk of a tree. It was like this piece of wood was telling me, “What are you doing, don’t you see I am a tree?” I then chose to paint more branches by cleaning some parts of the mud.