At home in Brussels as a child I was reading Hergé Tintin albums and vowed that I would live my life as a traveling adventurer just like Tintin. At around 6 years of age started kids’ art school at the local academy in Uccle. I was attracted to forms, colours in nature, fauna, dreaming of faraway countries where people and nature looked different.
As an only child, I had a few best friends: my cat and my illustrated world encyclopaedia, also a collection of Jules Verne with the gorgeous illustrations of Riou and Neuville and of course my full collection of “The adventures of Tintin.” I went on with the junior art academy all the years up to the end of high school. By then my ambitions were more and more defined. The hippie movement and May 68 were literally exploding and changing society . I decided to catch the tail end of it between studies and graduation at the Académie des Beaux Arts of Brussels and holidays in the minor traveler’s gathering such as Crete and Morocco.
Holidays became longer and longer and led to a full-blown grand escape to Turkey on a Magic Bus and then across Iran, Afghanistan and Kathmandu, our grail, the museum temple city, the ultimate time travel experience.
When you come from Brussels, Uccle to be precise, the symphony of the east is so strikingly impressive, slowly you absorb it, slowly it becomes your universe as a person but also as an artist. I can say with no doubt that these 10 years passed on the sub-continent whether it be on a Goa beach or trekking with saddhus in Kailash or amongst the millions of faces and bodies coated in ashes at the Haridwar Kumbh Mela gets to your core personality and changes your visuals.
I love colours. They have their own philosophy and intelligence. I work with pigments, Egg Tempera and oil . I make my own colours, every one of them. When I came back to the west, I lived in New York west village with a collection of Indian antique jewellery, Indonesian Ikats from all over the islands, and new perspectives .
In 1987 I came back to Brussels and studied special effects and make up for cinema, theatre. This helped me to figure out the kitchen DIY of painting, the problem solving of canvas tactics on human faces and bodies. And the creativity of team film making. I worked as a special effects and makeup designer for a few years mainly in art house ventures, Indie films and theatre. By then I became the mother of a lovely boy and devoted myself being a mother. Did a few photographic shows, my main theme in those days were misty forests and human tree souls in rural mystery landscapes and coal barges on foggy canals in Wallonia.
Became Art director in the Brussels art gallery ran by Maria Mineta. When I left the gallery, after 13 years of organising art fairs and exhibitions all over the planet it went to move on to the restoration of a sailboat in a shipyard in Portugal.
My fascination for shipyards and boats as well as my new freedom, came to a peak with the amazing discovery of marine landscapes on boat hulls under renovation and maintenance. That would be my main artistic drive for the next few years. First a photo project that emanated from a self-induced obsession with the layers of anti-fouling and the beautiful unveiling of this deadly chemical, as well of the return to my first interest: Painting.
Most of my work between 2015 and 2019 is directly inspired from boat hull image dissections turned into abstract symbolist landscapes in large formats. My photographic work and paintings of that period is well documented here. In 2017 I painted a portrait of my black and white cat, then another portrait of my partner. Over the last two years I’ve been moving from being a landscaper to more figurative work, portraits and life studies.
Prompted by a lot of personal reflections and reading, I have begun to explore the land of female sexuality and eroticism in my work. This new development of my art is risky as it got me censured already, but it thrills me. I am enjoying my adventure of exploring situations from my perception as an artist. I paint intimate portraits of friends in a general concept of enhancing the female body pride and confidence.
I explore atypical situations in a women’s gaze of sexual fantasies
I could call myself an outsider who uses art as therapy.
At this moment in life, I work and live in Algarve, Portugal, in Brussels Belgium and in Creuse , France.
