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The Happiness of Painting: a few words from the artist.
"I have been painting with oil paint for so long that I'm starting to work with it well. I was nine or ten years old when I wanted, for the first time, to paint on my father's canvas too, one Sunday. 'Go for it, train yourself ', he said, throwing to me a sheet of paper, some old Bic ballpoint pens and dried-up markers. What an insult for me! It was awful!"
"Much later, after three years of studying at the Beaux Arts, I decided one fine morning to travel through the Sahara from north to south with a friend, an old marabout and five camels carrying 200 kilosof equipment for painting. Travelling and painting, which I haven't stopped doing ever since. It was so crazy, after having walked for hours and hours, with the mind literally empty, to suddenly feel the living energy of the ground under my feet."
"I like to paint today everyday life things that everybody knows, so simple, that they seem to be without substance, so ordinary, so plain, that nobody pays attention to them, as if life did not belong there. spoon, a ladle, a strainer, a drill, a pan, becoming, on canvas, my trophies."
"I like the insignificant, everything that is neglected, evicted, the drive from one place to another, for example, everything that makes the road, the ground, the sky, the vanishing landscape of all these erased moments of non-existence, since the only thing that matters is the place of destination, the onlything one thinks about, the place from which one expects everything, where everything is going to happen, the one towards which one projects life."
"That is the happiness of the world, and the happiness of painting too." (Laughs).
as reported by Dorothée Lalanne, Paris,1999
Design by Lefty© Fondation Tanagra