My artistic approach
I paint the trivial,
draw the insignificant,
photograph the poetry of everyday life,
and write the fleetingness of my sensations.
The seeds of my pictorial stories come from the ephemeral beauty of everyday life, as my eyes see them. In recent years, the lockdown periods have renewed my gaze on the beauty of the trivial. A ray of sunshine in the kitchen, a petal that has been left behind on the living room table, the wild grasses that make their way along our roadsides, nature that emerges from the cracks in the asphalt… I paint series on what we no longer see – nature in the city, roadsides, home, walks at plant height, market stalls, garden seasons, homemade bouquets, etc. – to which I add a few words… (My portfolio is available here) I call them my paintings-haikus. I hope that those who look at my paintings experience a lightening of the spirit, a soothing moment, a joy of the heart and will be drawn beyond the image presented into the vastness of their inner space. Using my smartphone, I observe and photograph the living system through the seasons which invite me each year to declutter my inner self in autumn, rest during winter, be reborn in spring and celebrate in summer, as I am taught through the practice of Qi Gong.
The subjects of my painting spring from the intersection of two focal points.
My series of individual paintings can be modulated into triptychs or scenographies which become “wholes that are more than the sum of their parts” and new seeds of stories…
Zooming in: after seeking answers through the study of history and later through the technological conception of the future, I am painting again to celebrate the present moment. To honour and love the familiar beauty of the living that surrounds me daily.
Zooming out: climate change, pandemics, the upheaval of all our industries and ways of working, the dynamics of the market economy, all come full circle to the concerns I shared as a child in the 1970s. Today, I am still a child of the Flower Power movement, deeply concerned by our immobility and chronic procrastination to accept ourselves as beings of nature and to take care of our Home Sweet home.
The choice of digital technology
With the constant intention of keeping things simple, moving lightly, not depending on a studio or complicated design processes, I work with the most common technological tools: a smartphone to observe, an iPad to paint and write, and some paper to print.
After ten years of absence, I got back in touch with painting thanks to a combination of circumstances: deprivation of space and nature during confinement, the expertise I honed over the last twenty years on tech and digital as well as the unexpected gift of an iPad, repaired by my son, on which I installed a pictorial and graphic creation software. First amazed by the latest advances in technology, I discovered with delight the comfort of a digital palette that could be carried anywhere and used here and now. I embraced this tool with enthusiasm, aware of its profound implications on the transformation of the traditional painting medium. (I can easily imagine how excited painters must have been when in 1851 the first tubes of ready-to-use paint arrived and allowed a bunch of young impressionist rebels to leave the studio!) Thanks to digital painting, which offers access to multiple originals, I enthusiastically welcome the possibility of making my work accessible to the greatest number of people by distributing a small part of my work in my studio shop in the form of art prints in standard formats on Fine Art paper (produced in France) with high quality pigment inks, of telling singular stories adapted to various exhibition places and, simultaneously and finally maybe, of using the possible NFT certification to prove the uniqueness of my paintings on the blockchain. But for the time being I have chosen not to use NFTs* because of their strong negative impact on the environment.
I am always looking for arable land for my seeds…
Sir Ken Robinson, the champion of creativity in education, reminded us that to cultivate the creative flame, it is necessary to take care of “the soil, the sunlight and irrigation conditions, not the plant!” I share his point of view. And here I am, determined to sow my pictorial seeds in fertile soil without mechanization, chemical fertilizers, or pesticides. As in permaculture, these seeds of stories feed each other and germinate day after day, season after season. I invite you to follow them on my Instagram profile or on my Facebook page.
* A nonfungible token (NFT) is a non-duplicable digital asset issued and exchangeable on a blockchain network. These objects can be anything, but most NFTs represent works of art. The minting of NFTs is very energy intensive. When an NFT is minted, a transaction takes place on the blockchain regarding the newly circulated asset. For each transaction on the blockchain, the network must verify that transaction to ensure its accuracy.
Contact
I am always open to new meetings and exchanges around exhibition projects. (The myth of the cursed and solitary artist is over ;-) So, don't hesitate to contact me !
Email : audeATaudesimon.com