North Sea Melancholy

As a kid, I went many summers on holidays in the South of France. I can very clearly remember this unique Mediterranean light. As a grown-up, I'm still very attracted by it, like a huge insect flying around a lamp. Nearly 30 years after my last trip to the South of France, I keep seeing the Mediterranean like my natural habitat. Most of my life, I've been staying away from "cold or/and northern places" while travelling. So you can imagine how strange that was for me to meet the North Sea for the first time. During a grey autumn. Surprisingly, that was beautiful. The beaches, the villages, the towns all have that strange feeling of melancholy and loneliness. We felt like they where places out of space, time out of time. Landscapes were like  weird paintings full of emptyness. Emptyness, but optimistic emptyness. Like black and white drawing books pages waiting for colours. Empty pages everyone can fill like he/she wants. Empty pages waiting to be filled with colourful dreams. Pure poetry. 

That was the low tourist season, so even amusement parks were communicating this feeling of mysterious emptyness.

Houses, dogs, people or even paper planes were contributing to increase that feeling of loneliness. A beautiful loneliness. The few human beings and animals we saw were like ghostly apparitions disapearing as quick as they arrive.

And those colours painting a picture more perfect than the most perfect paintings : beige, turquoise white and teal. 

As an artist, this is impossible not to be inspired by such a captivating atmosphere. I started with a collection of collages...

...and then paintings. Among them, one of the few I made using watercolours. Years later, it appeared that was quite a good idea, since this is the first work I sold to an unknown. 

Then came a second watercolours painting plus other ones made using the technic I'm the more comfortable with : acrylic.