My Creative Journey: Art, Projects & Inspirations

An ordinary school trip, one room among many, and then a canvas I stopped in front of without knowing why, while the rest of the class was already moving on. The teacher had to call me twice. At eight years old, I couldn't have said what was holding me there, only that something in the colors spoke to me louder than the rest of the room, and that I didn't want it to end.

A book borrowed almost at random from the school library shelves, flipped through between two classes. Thick blocks of color, a texture almost scraped with a trowel, a light that didn't try to look like anything specific. I stayed sitting on the floor in the hallway looking at it longer than expected, late for the next class, with that strange feeling that I had just been given permission for something I didn't even know I needed permission for.

Three years spent trying every possible style before abandoning most of them, often within the same week. A professor who tears up a piece of work in front of everyone without warning, another who stays silent for so long in front of a canvas that you no longer know if it's a compliment or a disaster. I imitated de Staël secretly during the first year, before breaking away somewhat clumsily in the second, never really knowing, upon graduating, if I had a style or just a collection of poorly digested borrowings.

Three days of painting with almost no sleep, morning light that bears no resemblance to that of Bordeaux, a pink on the boats that I would never have dared to put on canvas before seeing it with my own eyes. I came back with full sketchbooks and a palette that had shifted without me consciously deciding a thing. I still couldn't explain exactly what this trip changed, only that my paintings afterwards no longer looked quite like the ones from before.

An ad for a collective space, four other painters I didn't know, a shared rent that made it financially possible. During the first week, I painted with my studio corner door almost closed, embarrassed for anyone to see my work in progress. One of the others stopped by one day without warning, looked for a long time without saying a word, then asked me a technical question so precise that I realized he had truly looked, not just cast a polite glance.

Eight years together, and then nothing at all, in the space of a conversation that lasted less than an hour. I didn't paint for the two weeks that followed, not out of principle, just because nothing came when I sat in front of a blank canvas. I couldn't say today if what changed in my work afterwards really came from that or something else, but the two happened at roughly the same time.

Several months where I went to the studio almost out of habit, almost out of guilt, and where I often left without having touched a brush. Canvases started and then turned against the wall, unable to look at them for more than thirty seconds. The others in the collective stopped asking me how it was going, which was in a sense a relief. I don't have a neat story to tell about what made it start again; one day it just began to flow again, without me knowing why that day specifically and not another.

Eleven canvases on the walls, my name printed small on the invitation card, and that absurd feeling of wanting to disappear even though this was exactly what I had wished for for years. About thirty people showed up, mostly close friends and family, and two strangers who stood for a long time in front of the same painting without me daring to ask what they thought of it. One canvas sold out of eleven, which was neither a triumph nor a failure, just a number I obsessed over for weeks for reasons I still can't fully explain.

A dozen canvases started over several months, using the same tight palette that I had never used so systematically before, almost monochrome in places. I don't know yet if this direction is the right one, if I will stick with it in two years, or if I will look back on it later as a mere parenthesis. Some days I believe in it completely; others, I wonder if I am not simply repeating myself under a different veneer.

Right now, three canvases are progressing simultaneously in the studio, at different stages, without me knowing which one I will finish first or if the three will one day belong to the same series. I am thirty-five years old and I still don't have a definitive answer to give when people ask me what I paint, nor do I always want to have one. It simply continues, somewhat at the mercy of the days when it comes and those when it doesn't.