This exhibition changed many things

And it is interesting to see how planning an event or a deadline for something you love can have an impact on your whole "work".

Hello my friends,

I am not very consistent lately. As usual I try my best and I think “it is ok” if I don’t show up every Friday even if, again, I try my best to do so. As I already said I stopped being upset with myself not being able to do “everything”.

But recently many things happened and I thought it could be a good idea to share with you the impact the exhibition I just did had on my work and my projects.

I will try to separate everything in points to make it easy to follow and for me easy to organise.

1. I started painting again at the end of 2023. Why? Because I regularly do mural projects and I love painting. I also love painting outside in the city. And for my last mural project, I could design exactly the idea I had in mind:

And I thought to myself: “Man I would love to do the same kind of things on canvas.

This is how I started painting again. And soon after that, my colleague at the studio, Stéphane, offered me to do an exhibition with him as a good motivation to create and produce.

First insight: Having a project with a deadline totally changes your perspective.

2. I started then to produce. I really enjoyed it and it opened doors to different techniques, especially collage. In June I did a lettering workshop where one of the exercises was to create a lettering with cutout letters. I then realised that playing with colour paper was to fun and so important for my work. Here are a few examples:

And this became the bigger surprise for me in 2024. For several years I worked around a style I found sometimes tricky to reproduce exactly the way I wanted because I did not have enough “accidents” in my designs. And through these collage exercises, I found them.

Second Insight: working analogically brings life to your work. Here cutouts bring the emotions I needed.

3. Then, while spending everyday playing with color paper, I found myself stuck with colors I am not used to work with. When I started with color papers, I used blue, beige and other colors I usually play with. But at some point, the remaining colors were not the ones I know well.

   But I started to try things with them and discovered another world: I can make the similar collage but with 2 different color palette I can have 2 different atmospheres.

   Example:

I did create that collage for the exhibition. I took a color palette I particularly like to work with: pop and vibrant colors. This is something I know and I am used to work with. But then, I wanted to do another collage, same size, and just had some beige, pine tree green and orange. I tried something with it and this is the result:

Sorry for the poor image quality here but this is enough to see that the result is totally different. Same kind of work but here the colors bring more wilderness, more dusty stuff, folk art or even Native American art.

And at first, I was not sure if I did like it. But the more I looked at it the more I liked it at a point that this became one of my favorites. And this happened because I did not control everything. I did let go of my control of colors to learn to play with what I had on my table.

Third insight: playing outside of your confort is what makes you progress. You discover a bit more yourself each time you do it.

Here are the 3 collages I did for the exhibition:

4. Last thing I learned doing this stuff and that may be the most important part to me in some way is how I learned to play while doing these collages. I never did sketch anything in advance. My process is pretty simple: “cut and glue”. So for each artwork, I did start with the lettering piece, just to position it and put illustrations around. But even for the lettering the idea was clear: I cut, I position and I glue. And if I am not sure about the shape, I try to make the next letter better to keep the global harmony. It means I don’t know in advance how it is to look like. I don’t know the outcome before it’s done.

   

   And this is for me a kind of “let go” creative process. I don’t know much about painters but sometimes I feel like some abstract artists start and are not sure where they go. It is a kind of the same thing here. And the global process is this: I position and glue the lettering and then I start the illustrations around it. I try to mix the colors and the kind of shapes so it stays harmonious. So no same color next one to each other or round forms are always next to edgy forms. You see the deal. And wow this is so good and relieving.

This will be my last insight: create without fears and net. Just let go of the outcome and explore your creativity. Even with rules, this is ok.

This way of seeing things had then an impact on my paintings and work in general. I started doing collages as sketches for all my work. I wanted to paint in that style. I did then create a collage using the same process I explained above:

And decided to make a painting out of it, but with another color palette:

Here it is at the exhibition: 97x130cms. And even for creating that painting, I did use stencils I did myself, and if I knew where I was going, you can see it is not exactly like the collage. This is because I want to keep a kind of freedom in that kind of painting and I want to be able to modify it as long as I paint it and see it becoming something.

So voilà ! This is the impact planning an exhibition had on my work. And recently I worked on a few apparel projects and all my designs start with paper and scissors.

Take a moment to think of it and see how you could integrate that kind of freedom in your work. How you could let it go of perfection and in some way technique. How you could go out of your confort zone and “discover yourself”. This may sound a bit cheesy but yes this is it. Creativity can be really powerful and I am discovering it right now. And I wanted to share it with you :)

For those interested, the “Get Out” painting and the green and orange “Calling Outdoor” collage are still available. Contact me if you are interested. I may do some Fine Arts prints of some of them too.

Enjoy your weekend and if you have any question or remark, please share.