How one can move from magistracy to painting?
Life’s path is never completely a matter of chance. The desire is innate, very deeply rooted. I had chosen another professional direction…exciting, but that doesn’t leave very much time to paint!
I have been spending all my time painting, for ten years now. Though, until now, I had never really felt the need to explain and show my work.

Precisely, how can you explain this desire for painting?
Painting is not for me an absolute or vital need. I think that, if I didn’t have this activity, I could find other ways of expressing myself. Nevertheless, it certainly remains a very enriching work: I have learnt much from painting: patience, humility, the quality of the way I look around me. Through painting, you can express yourself without speaking or writing…It says what  words cannot express. This suits me very well and is how painting justifies my being.

What do you wish to express through your work?
The colours of life, the gushing of a changed world. A happy digression in every day dullness. A desire of tenderness, of poetry, and why not, a rediscovering of childhood, its purity, its innocence. Another way to look at the world, favouring beauty and delicacy in all things, giving them a soul.

You mostly paint towns and portraits. Can you explain these choices?
All is matter of interest, of perception…I am definitely an urban person:  I love large cities. I find them beautiful, fascinating. The streets, the houses, the shapes and colours, the atmosphere that emerges. I change them into places like dream. I would like them multicoloured, warm, musical.
As for the portraits, may be they are the people who fill my towns? It is very pleasant for me to create them, to make them live and express all that they inspire to me about humanity. As you would take a picture, I try to fix a fleeting expression, may be the anguish of passing time…

You have an approach to abstract art?
I always feel, at the beginning, the necessity to hang on to an idea, but I sometimes move away from the object, to transpose it in an imaginary world that probably finds its roots in my past, my memory. The painting then becomes its own subject, the form being the only aesthetic desire.

For example?
Let’s take a house…the symbolic shelter of stability and protection. For me, it mainly exists by what it is made of: stones, walls, thick and rich, with their own history. Spontaneously, I paint an arrangement of squares and rectangles, until filling the empty space and time. The aesthetic concern is always present. I can cut up these primary forms, juxtapose them and add paint and collages, to give them more presence on the canvas. Often, I enlarge some fragments to create another image which will have its own autonomy…thus, by ramifications and entanglements, the canvases go on, and moving away from reality touches the limits of non-figuration. My collages too, are part of this continuity.

Your painting explores all art forms. Aren’t you afraid to get distracted?
The diversity isn’t a problem for me. I don’t feel like entering in a style. I believe on the opposite, that it is from breaking down the very personal logic of a work brings about its coherence.

You use all techniques too?
Colour is essential: it gives all its meaning to the message. If the red, symbol of warmness and vitality dominates, today my tones tend to soften. Colour compels me itself while I’m painting, I do not really choose it.
There is the raw material itself. I paint mainly with watercolours and feel at ease experimenting with all kinds of paints, all that can give consistency and transparency. Colours and materials are inseparable. I let myself use all techniques. Painting is a world of liberty…but of hand working liberty.

Finally, how would you define yourself as an artist?
I am not an art intellectual, I’m looking neither for scandal nor provocation. I have no other message but to deliver emotion. Finally I consider myself rather as a craftsman, a hard working artist, well implanted in the modern world, who, naturally, always following her own instinct, tries to get close to Beauty. It is not a choice: I paint in the same way I live…

Interview realised by Patricia Le Sage – Contact: le-sage.patr@wanadoo.fr