In the set bodies (black&white),  we can find sketches of naked bodies, using charcoal or lead.

The drawing hand follows the continual coming and going of the eyes in a gesture that alters weight and speed depending on the different grains of the skin. The point is, rather than making a photographic picture of the model, to note sensations down.

7 Ciels (7 Skies) is a series of postcards depicting the view I could contemplate from my window when I was living on the 16th floor of a high rise building of La Défense in Paris. This area was under construction at that time (1999-2000). The intense colors of the sky – due to pollution – and the lyrical quality of that urban landscape of cranes, factories, unfinished buildings, steep windswept streets, crowned by apocalyptical red-pink sunsets or enshrouded in melancholy clouds, were a source of endless fascination to me.

My friend, poet Violaine Guillerm, and I decided to collect « 7 skies » into a booklet, give titles to them, and write short texts, as you would find on the back of postcards. It remains unpublished.

Each picture is a mixed media painting – ink, soft pastels, watercolor, and collage on paper – in the size of usual postcards (A6 = 10,5cm x 14,8cm).

Album du Rêve (Album of the Dream) resulted from various digressions connected with desire, distance, solitude and passing time. I’m describing here a rather melancholy moment: when, by crumbling up your memories though expecting nothing, a dream is taking shape. The pictures’ titles give direct information about the general contents of the album: «rêve» (dream), «habitation de l’attente» (inhabiting the wait), «ô solitude!», «à propos d’amour» (about love). I should have linked «Quadriptyque de l’Oisiveté», «Diptyque-Cantique» and the triptych «Wroclaw 0808» to the Album of the Dream. I preferred isolating these three ensembles in order to better detail their genesis. The sketches that I made previously to the canvases can be found in section «work on paper» —> «exercices préparatoires au Rêve» and «solitude/distance» so as in section «poetry and music» —> «Amour».

Among the 4 pictures presented here, I only painted «habitation de l’attente» with acrylics. I used for the others oil on canvas.

La Vendée, also known as Côte de Lumière or Coast of Light, is where I regularly go on vacation. My parents live there. Whenever I visit them, I spend hours by the ocean, enjoying the same places again and again.

In 2012, I received a huge pastel box for my birthday, a treasure of  200 colors! I immediately relished delving into them to draw the light, the sea, the sky, the beach and the rocks. I soon initiated a sort of holiday ritual: one picture a week, same place, same size. The pastels stay at my parents’. They have become a basis material of this “free-time-album”. I mix them with watercolors, inks, pencils and acrylics, and frequently resort to collage in order to create tactile effects. For each picture I use 24×32 cm sheets of thick paper.

The 200x100cm format lends itself to certain panoramic and linear explorations. I gathered here two canvases whose common feature is precisely that occupation of space across the width. The first canvas depicts a promenade (stroll), or how the eye circulates through a series of touristic details. On the second canvas, I represented a mur (wall) under different aspects : there is the dividing wall that isolates, shelters or stands in the way, there is the wall that one goes through like a crucial experience of life, the wall that supports graffitis, the wall in ruins where weeds grow …

I painted both panneaux (panels) using a mix media technique with collage, acrylics and pastels.

I always carry in my handbag a small notebook with white sheets in which I have fun sketching with lead and color pencils. My models are often animals (with a predilection for birds) and sometimes landscapes. I do these exercises as a hobby, charmed by certain exotic names, and trying in a playful manner to better my traditional drawing technique. Petits dessins pour rire (small sketches for fun) are pages selected from my successive notebooks.