Travel as a workshop
People often ask me where I find my shapes. The answer is one word: outside.
I almost never draw. I look, and I keep. A journey is not a pause in my work, it is where the work begins.
First there are the beaches. Kamala, Koh Phi Phi, Koh Lanta, and that Thai light which gives shells colours you would not believe natural. Further north, Chiang Mai, then Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Bangkok. The Seychelles and their tortoises, the coco de mer whose shape alone is a lesson in sculpture. Kenya, Lamu, the beach at Shella.
Then there is what lies close by, and what I never tire of looking at. The bay of the Authie and its sea lavender, Wissant, Audresselles, Wimille, Boulogne-sur-Mer, the samphire between the Two Capes. The Opal Coast lives up to its name: it changes colour with the hour, like a stone you turn in your hand.
Brittany and Normandy gave me something else. Mont Saint-Michel, the Île-aux-Moines, Belle-Île-en-Mer, Brest. Greys, dark greens, low horizons.
And then water again, in all its forms. Niagara Falls, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec. Lake Geneva seen from the Rochers de Naye, Montreux, Lausanne, Yvoire. The fjords of Norway under the midnight sun, where night never falls and everything becomes reflection.
Cruises, in fact, taught me to look from the water rather than from the shore: the Garonne, the Dordogne and the Gironde, the Loire and its châteaux, the Seine over dinner, the Mediterranean as far as Rome.
The rest comes down to a list I like to read again. London, Paris, Monaco, Nice, Cannes and the island of Sainte-Marguerite. Budapest, Bratislava. Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Liège, Luxembourg. The vineyards of Saint-Émilion and the cave villages. Caussade and its hats. Lourdes. Canet-Plage, Leucate, Perpignan, Andorra, the Millau viaduct, Vaison-la-Romaine.
None of this appears as such in my pieces. But when I am looking for a colour, that is where I go to find it.