GETTING OUT OF ONE'S OWN PALETTE

ALLOWING THE COLOUR TO BE LED BY AN EXTERNAL SUGGESTION

 

“A thin, green-yellow wash of light underlying bare ground, bare trees, warmly luminous and promising.”

From “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath” 11 March 1959

 

Color advances within its core. One colour brings to another through a natural movement of things. But sometimes it escapes the internal process of one's own palette and moves, not starting from one's own interiority, but by a pressure coming from the outside. A deviation, an external stimulus, that I welcome creating an internal shift within the work. In this chapter, there are some examples of "Sedimentations", in which I've continued the painting process of layering one color on top of another, influenced one time by a piece of literature, at other times by the paintings of a picture gallery, by a single painting, etc.
Since I was a child and even more so when I became a painter, what I have always kept in consideration, what I have observed insistently whenever looking at painting in the history of art are colours. The more I entered into painting, the more I saw forms disappear; the more I immersed myself through my gaze, the more I saw splotches, surfaces, brushstrokes, dots and touches of colour emerge.
Now that I have arrived at the total concentration on colour in my painting dimension, I have decided to give each colour the space to exist on its own. Stratifying one on top of the other, I didn’t want any of them to disappear completely, but for them to have the chance to keep existing. In the top part of the painting where their presence remains visible, all the colours can continue to converse with each other. This strip maintains the history of the painting and summarises how I work on it while I am painting, starting with the observation of another painter’s painting.


ON COMMISSION
This procedure of moving away from one’s own palette in order to be open to external inspiration can also be stimulated by the person commissioning a work.
The relationship with another work can thus be determined by the request of someone who asks me to relate to their painting.
It is possible to create a painting by entering into contact with the mood of the palette of another painter, putting the coloristic impressions one layer on top of the other and then placing them side by side with the pre-existing painting in the form of a diptych.

(Written in 2019)