5ème painting : Love

The lecturer, whose work I invite you to follow, Leon Dubois, suggests that we experiment with cyanotype, focusing on the theme of the Little Prince and the city of Montlucon. I draw two women on two planets, a baobab woman and a woman with an elephant in her belly. Here's what Saint-Exupéry said in his book:

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"My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. So I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained.”
"Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion"

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When I went to Joelle's house the following week, I was still feeling inspired by this experience and painted a woman on cardboard, with several animals, including the elephant. I then used that work for my large-format painting. I decided to use aluminum foil collage for the floor and for the figure's dress. And something unexpected happened! I was painting a woman, but her silhouette was that of The Little Prince. With that in mind, I went to the couch. During the session, I realized that in this painting I'm talking about my unborn brother and his place in my life. And so, 43 years after my birth, I continue to mourn this brother who never lived, while no one else in my family mourns him! He has no name, no grave, no existence, and yet he fills mine.

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Baby Blues

The feel-blue baby is her little tyrant
The blue baby is her me child
He took everything, she laid down her arms She laid down her arms, tears for alarms

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I have allowed this non-life to become a part of my life, as though I didn't fully possess the right to live my own life. I feel like an impostor who should not have been born if he had lived. I feel guilty that I survived my birth while he did not.

I need to give this brother a body so that he can exist outside of me.

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So this painting is a representation of the confusion between the masculine and the feminine, between my life and theirs, to get myself out of it.

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A few weeks later, I painted the face, giving it both feminine and masculine features, leaving its gender in doubt. As a nod to the baobab woman in the cyanotype workshop, the figure was rooted in the ground.

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I glued a cardboard elephant in place of his heart.