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When I was a kid, my father owned a tape recorder onto which, one day, to amuse me, he placed some small, multicolored round stickers. Once the tape recorder was on, the stickers on the big wheels would create the most amazing visual and sound effects. A true carousel. This is one of my fondest childhood memories. In fact, the multicolored dots and bubbles that one finds in my drawings today are the remains of this early memory. Similarly, growing up, I remember spending hours on the ground beside our piano on which encyclopedias on painting were laid out in order to examine them. As a teenager, though, I dreamt of becoming a film director. |
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When I was a kid, my father owned a tape recorder onto which, one day, to amuse me, he placed some small, multicolored round stickers. Once the tape recorder was on, the stickers on the big wheels would create the most amazing visual and sound effects. A true carousel. This is one of my fondest childhood memories. In fact, the multicolored dots and bubbles that one finds in my drawings today are the remains of this early memory.
Similarly, growing up, I remember spending hours on the ground beside our piano on which encyclopedias on painting were laid out in order to examine them. As a teenager, though, I dreamt of becoming a film director. I would spend afternoons cutting, pasting and archiving old and modern movie magazines. Finally, I succeeeded in putting together a small cinematographic library. Come to think of it, I was more fascinated with the screen captures taken from movies than with the movies themselves. I believe my interest in illustration may have started right then and there; at my discovery that a still image in a frame could tell a whole story all by itself.
At this same time, I started buying vinyl records. Lying on the floor, I would stare at the 33 RPM sleeve for hours while listening to the music. I would design my own sleeves for the tapes that I had recorded and, soon enough, my friends at school started asking me to design theirs. In some sense, these were my first “commissions.” I really enjoyed designing these covers and would put a lot of hard work into them. I remember a friend who, one day, was very disconcerted by a cover that I had designed for him. I had drawn a pair of black and white shoes seen from above and, not being able to perceive any originality in this design, he sent me right back to the drawing board. Unfortunately now, the same thing happens professionaly!
The summers during my teenage years were entirely dedicated to drawing. My technique was very rudimentary at first, using only felt pens, but it later evolved when I discovered paint, watercolor especially. In my drawings, I would have a recurrent character that I would feature in different deserted landscapes. I was then still exploring Realism.
When I was not drawing, I would, with one of my friends who is also a young illustrator, make amateur movies with a Super 8 camera. We never had a script and, accordingly, those movies were basically long, boring travelling sequences shot with the aid of a supermarket cart. It makes sense to me now that we often designed the poster for the film long before finishing it.
It was very stimulating to have a friend who was as passionate about drawing and creating as I was. Every new drawing one of us made was a challenge for the other. When one of us had a good one, it was a standard for weeks, and the pressure would be on to make an even better one. I still remember some of the titles: The Yellow Truck, Le Punk in Color, The Man with the Gun…
My friend had mastered black and white. At that time, I had a hard time conceiving of and drawing with no color. These particular experiences date back to the period between 1985 and 1989, I would guess.
After that, though, everything fell logically into place; I studied art by attending two different Parisian art schools where I was incredibly bored. While there, however, I met my best friend (gone too soon). We would draw day and night both for ourselves and for our very first clients. We were both fond of the same artists; Pierre Le-Tan, Francis Bacon and David Hockney as well as of the quattrocento Italian painting style.
At this point, we stoppped going to classes and began partying. Ironically, most of my current professionnal contacts come from this period.
One day, I was approached by a journalist who wanted me to design a comic book retracing Serge Gainsbourg’s life. Unfortunately, after a year of work, the project was cancelled. But, two years later, I was hired to design my first-ever record cover for the same figure. After that, everything went extremely fast, children’s books, assistance to the art director for a record label, illustrations for magazines, more record covers. I also found an agent.
Today, I am still drawing and living my childhood dream.
